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Generating Arabic TAG for syntax-semantics analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2022

Cherifa Ben Khelil Open the ORCID record for Cherifa Ben Khelil [Opens in a new window] ,
Chiraz Ben Othmane Zribi ,
Denys Duchier  and
Yannick Parmentier
Cherifa Ben Khelil*
Affiliation:
LIFAT, Université de Tours, Tours 37200, France
Chiraz Ben Othmane Zribi
Affiliation:
RIADI, ENSI, Université La Manouba, La Manouba, Tunisia
Denys Duchier
Affiliation:
LIFO, Université d’Orléans, Orléans, France
Yannick Parmentier
Affiliation:
LORIA, Projet SYNALP, Université de Lorraine, Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy, France
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: cherifa.bk@gmail.com
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Abstract

Arabic presents many challenges for automatic processing. Although several research studies have addressed some issues, electronic resources for processing Arabic remain relatively rare or not widely available. In this paper, we propose a Tree-adjoining grammar with a syntax-semantic interface. It is applied to the modern standard Arabic, but it can be easily adapted to other languages. This grammar named “ArabTAG V2.0” (Arabic Tree Adjoining Grammar) is semi-automatically generated by means of an abstract representation called meta-grammar. To ensure its development, ArabTAG V2.0 benefits from a grammar testing environment that uses a corpus of phenomena. Further experiments were performed to check the coverage of this grammar as well as the syntax-semantic analysis. The results showed that ArabTAG V2.0 can cover the majority of syntactical structures and different linguistic phenomena with a precision rate of 88.76%. Moreover, we were able to semantically analyze sentences and build their semantic representations with a precision rate of about 95.63%.

Keywords

Tree-adjoining grammarMeta-grammarSyntaxSemanticSyntax/semantic interfaceSemantic framesArabic language

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Type
Article
Information
Natural Language Engineering , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , March 2023 , pp. 386 - 424
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© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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