We present a novel technique for Arabic morphological annotation. The technique utilizes diacritization to produce morphological annotations of quality comparable to human annotators. Although Arabic text is generally written without diacritics, diacritization is already available for large corpora of Arabic text in several genres. Furthermore, diacritization can be generated at a low cost for new text as it does not require specialized training beyond what educated Arabic typists know. The basic approach is to enrich the input to a state-of-the-art Arabic morphological analyzer with word diacritics (full or partial) to enhance its performance. When applied to fully diacritized text, our approach produces annotations with an accuracy of over 97% on lemma, part-of-speech, and tokenization combined.
@InProceedings{HABASH16.878,
author = {Nizar Habash and Anas Shahrour and Muhamed Al-Khalil}, title = {Exploiting Arabic Diacritization for High Quality Automatic Annotation}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)}, year = {2016}, month = {may}, date = {23-28}, location = {Portorož, Slovenia}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Marko Grobelnik and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Helene Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-9-1}, language = {english} }
Summary of the paper