MAGEAD: A Morphological Analyzer and Generator for the Arabic Dialects

Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the ACL, pages 681–688, Sydney, July 2006. c⃝2006 Association for Computational Linguistics MAGEAD: A Morphological Analyzer and Generator for the Arabic Dialects Nizar Habash and Owen Rambow Center for Computational Learning Systems Columbia University New York, NY 10115, USA � habash,rambow � @cs.columbia.edu Abstract We present MAGEAD, a morphological analyzer and generator for the Arabic lan- guage family. Our work is novel in that it explicitly addresses the need for pro- cessing the morphology of the dialects. MAGEAD performs an on-line analysis to or generation from a root+pattern+features representation, it has separate phonologi- cal and orthographic representations, and it allows for combining morphemes from different dialects. We present a detailed evaluation of MAGEAD. 1 Introduction In this paper we present MAGEAD, a morphologi- cal analyzer and generator for the Arabic language family, by which we mean both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and the spoken dialects.1 Our work is novel in that it explicitly addresses the need for processing the morphology of the dialects as well. The principal theoretical contribution of this pa- per is an organization of morphological knowl- edge for processing multiple variants of one lan- guage family. The principal practical contribu- tion is the first morphological analyzer and gen- erator for an Arabic dialect that includes a root- and-pattern analysis (which is also the first wide- coverage implementation of root-and-pattern mor- phology for any language using a multitape finite- state machine). We also provide a novel type of detailed evaluation in which we investigate how 1We would like to thank several anonymous reviewers for comments that helped us improve this paper. The work re- ported in this paper was supported by NSF Award 0329163, with additional work performed under the DARPA GALE program, contract HR0011-06-C-0023. The authors are listed in alphabetical order. different sources of lexical information affect per- formance of morphological analysis. This paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we present the relevant facts about morphology in the Arabic language family. Previous work is summarized in Section 3. We present our design goals in Section 4, and then discuss our approach to representing linguistic knowledge for morpho- logical analysis in Section 5. The implementa- tion is sketched in Section 6. We outline the steps involved in creating a Levantine analyzer in Sec- tion 7. We evaluate our system in Section 8, and then conclude. 2 Arabic Morphology 2.1 Variants of Arabic The Arabic-speaking world is characterized by diglossia (Ferguson, 1959). Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the shared written language from Morocco to the Gulf, but it is not a native lan- guage of anyone. It is spoken only in formal, scripted contexts (news, speeches). In addition, there is a continuum of spoken dialects (varying geographically, but also by social class, gender, etc.) which are native languages, but rarely writ- ten (except in very informal contexts: collections of folk tales, newsgroups, email, etc). We will re- fer to MSA and the dialects …

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