Morphotactic Modeling in an Open-source Multi-dialectal Arabic Morphological Analyzer and Generator

Nizar Habash, Reham Marzouk, Salam Khalifa, Christian Khairallah

Abstract: Arabic is a morphologically rich and complex language, with numerous dialectal variants. Previous efforts on Arabic morphology modeling focused on specific variants and specific domains using a range of techniques with different degrees of linguistic modeling transparency. In this paper we propose a new approach to modeling Arabic morphology with an eye towards multi-dialectness, resource openness, and easy extensibility and use. We demonstrate our approach by modeling verbs from Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic, within a common framework, and with high coverage.