Parsing Arabic Verb Phrases Using Pregroup Grammars

Abstract

Parsing of Arabic phrases is a crucial requirement for many applications such as question answering and machine translation. The calculus of pregroup introduced by Lambek as an algebraic computational machinery for the grammatical analysis of natural languages. Pregroup grammar used to analyse sentence structure in many European languages such as English, and non-European languages such as Japanese. In Arabic language, Lambek employed the notions of pregroup to analyse some grammatical structures such as conjugating the verb, tense modifiers and equational sentences. This work attempts to develop an initial phase of an efficient automatic pregroup grammar parser by using linear approach to analysethe verbal phrases of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The proposed system starts building Arabic lexicon contains all possible categories of Arabic verbs, then analysing the input verbal Arabic phrase to check if it is wellformed by using linear parsing algorithm based on pregroup grammar rules.

Keywords: Pregroup grammar, Lambek calculus, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), Arabic language analysis, Computational Arabic linguistic, Arabic sentence parser