2016
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Using Ambiguity Detection to Streamline Linguistic Annotation
Wajdi Zaghouani
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Abdelati Hawwari
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Sawsan Alqahtani
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Houda Bouamor
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Mahmoud Ghoneim
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Mona Diab
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Kemal Oflazer
Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity (CL4LC)
Arabic writing is typically underspecified for short vowels and other markups, referred to as diacritics. In addition to the lexical ambiguity exhibited in most languages, the lack of diacritics in written Arabic adds another layer of ambiguity which is an artifact of the orthography. In this paper, we present the details of three annotation experimental conditions designed to study the impact of automatic ambiguity detection, on annotation speed and quality in a large scale annotation project.
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SAMER: A Semi-Automatically Created Lexical Resource for Arabic Verbal Multiword Expressions Tokens Paradigm and their Morphosyntactic Features
Mohamed Al-Badrashiny
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Abdelati Hawwari
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Mahmoud Ghoneim
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Mona Diab
Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Asian Language Resources (ALR12)
Although MWE are relatively morphologically and syntactically fixed expressions, several types of flexibility can be observed in MWE, verbal MWE in particular. Identifying the degree of morphological and syntactic flexibility of MWE is very important for many Lexicographic and NLP tasks. Adding MWE variants/tokens to a dictionary resource requires characterizing the flexibility among other morphosyntactic features. Carrying out the task manually faces several challenges since it is a very laborious task time and effort wise, as well as it will suffer from coverage limitation. The problem is exacerbated in rich morphological languages where the average word in Arabic could have 12 possible inflection forms. Accordingly, in this paper we introduce a semi-automatic Arabic multiwords expressions resource (SAMER). We propose an automated method that identifies the morphological and syntactic flexibility of Arabic Verbal Multiword Expressions (AVMWE). All observed morphological variants and syntactic pattern alternations of an AVMWE are automatically acquired using large scale corpora. We look for three morphosyntactic aspects of AVMWE types investigating derivational and inflectional variations and syntactic templates, namely: 1) inflectional variation (inflectional paradigm) and calculating degree of flexibility; 2) derivational productivity; and 3) identifying and classifying the different syntactic types. We build a comprehensive list of AVMWE. Every token in the AVMWE list is lemmatized and tagged with POS information. We then search Arabic Gigaword and All ATBs for all possible flexible matches. For each AVMWE type we generate: a) a statistically ranked list of MWE-lexeme inflections and syntactic pattern alternations; b) An abstract syntactic template; and c) The most frequent form. Our technique is validated using a Golden MWE annotated list. The results shows that the quality of the generated resource is 80.04%.
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Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Computational Approaches to Code Switching
Mona Diab
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Pascale Fung
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Mahmoud Ghoneim
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Julia Hirschberg
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Thamar Solorio
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Computational Approaches to Code Switching
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Overview for the Second Shared Task on Language Identification in Code-Switched Data
Giovanni Molina
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Fahad AlGhamdi
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Mahmoud Ghoneim
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Abdelati Hawwari
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Nicolas Rey-Villamizar
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Mona Diab
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Thamar Solorio
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Computational Approaches to Code Switching
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Investigating the Impact of Various Partial Diacritization Schemes on Arabic-English Statistical Machine Translation
Sawsan Alqahtani
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Mahmoud Ghoneim
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Mona Diab
Conferences of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: MT Researchers' Track
Most diacritics in Arabic represent short vowels. In Arabic orthography, such diacritics are considered optional. The absence of these diacritics naturally leads to significant word ambiguity to top the inherent ambiguity present in fully diacritized words. Word ambiguity is a significant impediment for machine translation. Despite the ambiguity presented by lack of diacritization, context helps ameliorate the situation. Identifying the appropriate amount of diacritic restoration to reduce word sense ambiguity in the context of machine translation is the object of this paper. Diacritic marks help reduce the number of possible lexical word choices assigned to a source word which leads to better quality translated sentences. We investigate a variety of (linguistically motivated) partial diacritization schemes that preserve some of the semantics that in essence complement the implicit contextual information present in the sentences. We also study the effect of training data size and report results on three standard test sets that represent a combination of different genres. The results show statistically significant improvements for some schemes compared to two baselines: text with no diacritics (the typical writing system adopted for Arabic) and text that is fully diacritized.
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Explicit Fine grained Syntactic and Semantic Annotation of the Idafa Construction in Arabic
Abdelati Hawwari
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Mohammed Attia
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Mahmoud Ghoneim
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Mona Diab
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Idafa in traditional Arabic grammar is an umbrella construction that covers several phenomena including what is expressed in English as noun-noun compounds and Saxon and Norman genitives. Additionally, Idafa participates in some other constructions, such as quantifiers, quasi-prepositions, and adjectives. Identifying the various types of the Idafa construction (IC) is of importance to Natural Language processing (NLP) applications. Noun-Noun compounds exhibit special behavior in most languages impacting their semantic interpretation. Hence distinguishing them could have an impact on downstream NLP applications. The most comprehensive syntactic representation of the Arabic language is the LDC Arabic Treebank (ATB). In the ATB, ICs are not explicitly labeled and furthermore, there is no distinction between ICs of noun-noun relations and other traditional ICs. Hence, we devise a detailed syntactic and semantic typification process of the IC phenomenon in Arabic. We target the ATB as a platform for this classification. We render the ATB annotated with explicit IC labels but with the further semantic characterization which is useful for syntactic, semantic and cross language processing. Our typification of IC comprises 3 main syntactic IC types: FIC, GIC, and TIC, and they are further divided into 10 syntactic subclasses. The TIC group is further classified into semantic relations. We devise a method for automatic IC labeling and compare its yield against the CATiB treebank. Our evaluation shows that we achieve the same level of accuracy, but with the additional fine-grained classification into the various syntactic and semantic types.
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Guidelines and Framework for a Large Scale Arabic Diacritized Corpus
Wajdi Zaghouani
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Houda Bouamor
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Abdelati Hawwari
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Mona Diab
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Ossama Obeid
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Mahmoud Ghoneim
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Sawsan Alqahtani
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Kemal Oflazer
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
This paper presents the annotation guidelines developed as part of an effort to create a large scale manually diacritized corpus for various Arabic text genres. The target size of the annotated corpus is 2 million words. We summarize the guidelines and describe issues encountered during the training of the annotators. We also discuss the challenges posed by the complexity of the Arabic language and how they are addressed. Finally, we present the diacritization annotation procedure and detail the quality of the resulting annotations.
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Creating a Large Multi-Layered Representational Repository of Linguistic Code Switched Arabic Data
Mona Diab
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Mahmoud Ghoneim
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Abdelati Hawwari
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Fahad AlGhamdi
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Nada AlMarwani
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Mohamed Al-Badrashiny
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
We present our effort to create a large Multi-Layered representational repository of Linguistic Code-Switched Arabic data. The process involves developing clear annotation standards and Guidelines, streamlining the annotation process, and implementing quality control measures. We used two main protocols for annotation: in-lab gold annotations and crowd sourcing annotations. We developed a web-based annotation tool to facilitate the management of the annotation process. The current version of the repository contains a total of 886,252 tokens that are tagged into one of sixteen code-switching tags. The data exhibits code switching between Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Dialectal Arabic representing three data genres: Tweets, commentaries, and discussion fora. The overall Inter-Annotator Agreement is 93.1%.
2015
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Unsupervised False Friend Disambiguation Using Contextual Word Clusters and Parallel Word Alignments
Maryam Aminian
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Mahmoud Ghoneim
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Mona Diab
Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Syntax, Semantics and Structure in Statistical Translation
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A Pilot Study on Arabic Multi-Genre Corpus Diacritization
Houda Bouamor
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Wajdi Zaghouani
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Mona Diab
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Ossama Obeid
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Kemal Oflazer
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Mahmoud Ghoneim
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Abdelati Hawwari
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Arabic Natural Language Processing
2014
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Overview for the First Shared Task on Language Identification in Code-Switched Data
Thamar Solorio
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Elizabeth Blair
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Suraj Maharjan
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Steven Bethard
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Mona Diab
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Mahmoud Ghoneim
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Abdelati Hawwari
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Fahad AlGhamdi
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Julia Hirschberg
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Alison Chang
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Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computational Approaches to Code Switching
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Handling OOV Words in Dialectal Arabic to English Machine Translation
Maryam Aminian
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Mahmoud Ghoneim
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Mona Diab
Proceedings of the EMNLP’2014 Workshop on Language Technology for Closely Related Languages and Language Variants
2013
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Multiword Expressions in the Context of Statistical Machine Translation
Mahmoud Ghoneim
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Mona Diab
Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing
2007
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Arabic diacritization in the context of statistical machine translation
Mona Diab
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Mahmoud Ghoneim
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Nizar Habash
Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XI: Papers