Formal Description of Arabic Syntactic Structure in the Framework of the Government and Binding Theory

Authors

  • Hammo Bassam KASIT, CIS Department, The University of Jordan, Amman 11942
  • Moubaiddin Asma KASIT, Department of Linguistics, The University of Jordan, Amman 11942
  • Obeid Nadim KASIT, CIS Department, The University of Jordan, Amman 11942
  • Tuffaha Abeer KASIT, CIS Department, The University of Jordan, Amman 11942

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13053/cys-18-3-2017

Keywords:

Arabic syntax, Government and Binding theory, Arabic parser, Arabic natural language processing.

Abstract

The research focus in our paper is twofold: (a) to examine the extent to which simple Arabic sentence structures comply with the Government and Binding Theory (GB), and (b) to implement a simple Arabic Context Free Grammar (CFG) parser to analyze input sentence structures to improve some Arabic Natural Language Processing (ANLP) Applications. Here we present a parser that employs Chomsky’s Government and Binding (GB) theory to better understand the syntactic structure of Arabic sentences. We consider different simple word orders in Arabic and show how they are derived. We analyze different sentence orders including Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), Verb-Object-Subject  (VOS),  Verb-Subject-Object (VSO),  nominal  sentences,  nominal  sentences beginning with inna (and sisters) and question sentences. We tackle the analysis of the structures to develop syntactic rules for a fragment of Arabic grammar. We include two sets of rules: (1) rules on sentence structures that do not account for case and (2) rules on sentence structures that account for case of Noun Phrases (NPs). We present an implementation of the grammar rules in Prolog. The experiments revealed high accuracy in case assignment in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in the light of GB theory especially when the input sentences are tagged with identification of end cases.

Author Biographies

Hammo Bassam, KASIT, CIS Department, The University of Jordan, Amman 11942

received his B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan in (1987). He has M.Sc. in Computer Science from Northeastern University and Ph.D. in Computer Science from DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA (2002). He is an associate professor of NLP at the Department of Computer Information Systems and has been with the University of Jordan since 2003. His research interest is Arabic Natural Language Processing and its applications. He leads the ANLP research group at the University of Jordan.

Moubaiddin Asma, KASIT, Department of Linguistics, The University of Jordan, Amman 11942

received her B.A. in Language and Literature from the University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan in (1975). She has M.A. in Applied Linguistics in (1986) and Ph.D. in Language and Linguistics, University of Essex, England, U.K. in (1992). She is an assistant professor at the Department of Linguistics and she has been with the University of Jordan since 2004. Her research interests include syntax, semantic, language acquisition and knowledge sharing and dialog systems. She is a member of the Arabic Natural Language Processing team at the University of Jordan.

Obeid Nadim, KASIT, CIS Department, The University of Jordan, Amman 11942

received his B.Sc. in Mathematics in (1979) and B.Sc. in Business Administration in (1980) from Lebanese University, Lebanon.  He has M.Sc. in Computer Studies and Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Essex, England, U.K. in (1987).  He is a full professor at the Department of Computer Information Systems and he has been with the University of Jordan since 2004. His research interests include knowledge representation, multi agents and dialog systems. He is a member of the Arabic Natural Language Processing team at the University of Jordan.

Tuffaha Abeer, KASIT, CIS Department, The University of Jordan, Amman 11942

received her B.Sc. in Computer Information Systems in (2006) from the University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan.  She has M.Sc. in Computer Information Systems from the University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan in (2010).  She is a Senior Software Engineer with Souq.com in Amman, Jordan since 2013. Her research interests include Arabic syntax and semantics. She is a member of the Arabic Natural Language Processing team at the University of Jordan.

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Published

2014-09-18

Issue

Vol. 18 No. 3 (2014): 18(3) 2014 Thematic issue: Computational linguistics (Guest editor: Alexander Gelbukh)

Section

Articles

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