Constructing and Using Broad-coverage Lexical Resource for Enhancing Morphological Analysis of Arabic

Broad-coverage language resources which provide prior linguistic knowledge must improve the accuracy and the performance of NLP applications. We are constructing a broad-coverage lexical resource to improve the accuracy of morphological analyzers and part-of-speech taggers of Arabic text. Over the past 1200 years, many different kinds of Arabic language lexicons were constructed; these lexicons are different in ordering, size and aim or goal of construction. We collected 23 machine-readable lexicons, which are freely available on the web. We combined lexical resources into one large broad-coverage lexical resource by extracting information from disparate formats and merging traditional Arabic lexicons. To evaluate the broad-coverage lexical resource we computed coverage over the Qur'an, the Corpus of Contemporary Arabic, and a sample from the Arabic Web Corpus, using two methods. Counting exact word matches between test corpora and lexicon scored about 65-68%; Arabic has a rich m...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: LREC
• Authors: Majdi Sawalha, Eric Atwell
• Keywords: Arabic, Arabic Language Lexicons, Broad-coverage Lexical Resource, Education, LREC 2010