The Arabic Noun System Generation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multiple-stem approach to generate Arabic broken plurals, simplifying the morphological system by avoiding complex rules and providing a computational implementation that captures linguistic generalizations.

Contribution

It proposes a novel multiple-stem morphological framework for Arabic nouns, supported by linguistic, statistical, and computational evidence, improving over previous analyses.

Findings

The approach simplifies the Arabic plural system by eliminating complex rules.

Statistical evidence supports deriving broken plurals from multiple stems rather than roots.

Implementation in MORPHE demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Abstract

In this paper, we show that the multiple-stem approach to nouns with a broken plural pattern allows for greater generalizations to be stated in the morphological system. Such an approach dispenses with truncating/deleting rules and other complex rules that are required to account for the highly allomorphic broken plural system. The generation of inflected sound nouns necessitates a pre-specification of the affixes denoting the sound plural masculine and the sound plural feminine, namely uwna and aAt, in the lexicon. The first subsection of section one provides an evaluation of some of the previous analyses of the Arabic broken plural. We provide both linguistic and statistical evidence against deriving broken plurals from the singular or the root. In subsection two, we propose a multiple stem approach to the Arabic Noun Plural System within the Lexeme-based Morphology framework. In section two, we look at the noun inflection of Arabic. Section three provides an implementation of the Arabic Noun system in MORPHE. In this context, we show how the generalizations discussed in the linguistic analysis section are captured in Morphe using the equivalencing nodes.