We annotate 60,000 words of Classical Arabic (CA) with topics in philosophy, religion, literature, and law with fine-grain segment-based morphological descriptions. We use these annotations for building a morphological segmenter and part-of-speech (POS) tagger for CA. With character-level classification and features from the word and its lexical context, the segmenter achieves a word accuracy of 96.8% with the main issue being a high rate of out-of-vocabulary words. A token-based POS tagger achieves an accuracy of 96.22% with 97.72% on known tokens despite the small size of the corpus. An error analysis shows that most of the tagging errors are results of segmentation and that quality improves with more data being added. The morphological segmenter and tagger have a wide range of potential applications in processing CA, a low-resource variety of the language.

This paper presents an investigation of part of speech (POS) tagging for Arabic as it occurs naturally, i.e. unvocalized text (without diacritics). We also do not assume any prior tokenization, although this was used previously as a basis for POS tagging. Arabic is a morphologically complex language, i.e. there is a high number of inflections per word; and the tagset is larger than the typical tagset for English. Both factors, the second one being partly dependent on the first, increase the number of word/tag combinations, for which the POS tagger needs to find estimates, and thus they contribute to data sparseness. We present a novel approach to Arabic POS tagging that does not require any pre-processing, such as segmentation or tokenization: whole word tagging. In this approach, the complete word is assigned a complex POS tag, which includes morphological information. A competing approach investigates the effect of segmentation and vocalization on POS tagging to alleviate data sparseness and ambiguity. In the segmentation-based approach, we first automatically segment words and then POS tags the segments. The complex tagset encompasses 993 POS tags, whereas the segment-based tagset encompasses only 139 tags. However, segments are also more ambiguous, thus there are more possible combinations of segment tags. In realistic situations, in which we have no information about segmentation or vocalization, whole word tagging reaches the highest accuracy of 94.74%. If gold standard segmentation or vocalization is available, including this information improves POS tagging accuracy. However, while our automatic segmentation and vocalization modules reach state-of-the-art performance, their performance is not reliable enough for POS tagging and actually impairs POS tagging performance. Finally, we investigate whether a reduction of the complex tagset to the Extra-Reduced Tagset as suggested by . Arabic tokenization, part-of-speech tagging and morphological disambiguation in one fell swoop. In Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Ann Arbor, MI, USA, pp. 573-80) will alleviate the data sparseness problem. While the POS tagging accuracy increases due to the smaller tagset, a closer look shows that using a complex tagset for POS tagging and then converting the resulting annotation to the smaller tagset results in a higher accuracy than tagging using the smaller tagset directly.

In this paper, we use a corpus of about 100,000 happy moments written by people of different genders, marital statuses, parenthood statuses, and ages to explore the following questions: Are there differences between men and women, married and unmarried individuals, parents and non-parents, and people of different age groups in terms of their causes of happiness and how they express happiness? Can gender, marital status, parenthood status and/or age be predicted from textual data expressing happiness? The first question is tackled in two steps: first, we transform the happy moments into a set of topics, lemmas, part of speech sequences, and dependency relations; then, we use each set as predictors in multi-variable binary and multinomial logistic regressions to rank these predictors in terms of their influence on each outcome variable (gender, marital status, parenthood status and age). For the prediction task, we use character, lexical, grammatical, semantic, and syntactic features in a machine learning document classification approach. The classification algorithms used include logistic regression, gradient boosting, and fastText. Our results show that textual data expressing moments of happiness can be quite beneficial in understanding the “causes of happiness” for different social groups, and that social characteristics like gender, marital status, parenthood status, and, to some extent age, can be successfully predicted form such textual data. This research aims to bring together elements from philosophy and psychology to be examined by computational corpus linguistics methods in a way that promotes the use of Natural Language Processing for the Humanities.

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Arabic is a highly inflected language and a morpho-syntactically complex language with many differences compared to several languages that are heavily studied. It may thus require good pre-processing as it presents significant challenges for Natural Language Processing (NLP), specifically for Machine Translation (MT). This paper aims to examine how Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) can be improved using rule-based pre-processing and language analysis. We describe a hybrid translation approach coupling an Arabic-French statistical machine translation system using the Moses decoder with additional morphological rules that reduce the morphology of the source language (Arabic) to a level that makes it closer to that of the target language (French). Moreover, we introduce additional swapping rules for a structural matching between the source language and the target language. Two structural changes involving the positions of the pronouns and verbs in both the source and target languages have been attempted. The results show an improvement in the quality of translation and a gain in terms of BLEU score after introducing a pre-processing scheme for Arabic and applying these rules based on morphological variations and verb reordering (VS into SV constructions) in the source language (Arabic) according to their positions in the target language (French). Furthermore, a learning curve shows the improvement in terms on BLEU score under scarce-and largeresources conditions. The proposed approach is completed without increasing the amount of training data or radically changing the algorithms that can affect the translation or training engines.