Arabic morphology generation using a concatenative strategy

Abstract

Arabic inflectional morphology requires infixation, prefixation and suffixation, giving rise to a large space of morphological variation. In this paper we describe an approach to reducing the complexity of Arabic morphology generation using discrimination trees and transformational rules. By decoupling the problem of stem changes from that of prefixes and suffixes, we gain a significant reduction in the number of rules required, as much as a factor of three for certain verb types. We focus on hollow verbs but discuss the wider applicability of the approach. Introduction Morphologically, Arabic is a non-concatenative language. The basic problem with generating Arabic verbal morphology is the large number of variants that must be generated. Verbal stems are based on triliteral or quadriliteral roots (3- or 4-radicals). Stems are formed by a derivational combination of a root morpheme and a vowel melody; the two are arranged according to canonical patterns. Roots ar...