Peculiarities of the Arabic Language Processing: Morphological Modeling

Abstract

The paper deals with the features of morphological modeling of the Arabic language based on the definition of the specifics of its formalization. Morphological modeling is one of the key stages of automatic text analysis and includes tools for building a word form to a stem, root, definition of a part of speech, automatic construction (generation) of a given word form, etc. The objectives of the study are interdisciplinary in nature and include both the theoretical aspects of studying the features of the Arabic language, which are most relevant for its automatic processing, and the study of existing morphological analyzers and determining the specifics of their work. The practical part is based on testing the CAMeL Tools, one of the advantages of which is its comprehensive nature, which allows both preprocessing of text and solving applied problems, including sentiment analysis. The criteria for selecting examples for testing took into account the features of the Arabic language, which are difficult for its formalization (segmentation of functional words with continuous spelling, morphological and lexical homonymy, etc.). The variability of the generalized concept of “the Arabic language” is taken into account, which combines classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and modern Arabic dialects. Testing tools for morphological modeling allows us to draw conclusions about the need to improve the terminological apparatus, the variability of which is noted in the description of word forms. Such kind of variation (divergence from the concepts accepted in general linguistics) potentially leads to a distortion of the results of lexico-semantic analysis. During the analysis, some gaps were noted related to the definition of part-of-speech belonging, the description of word forms, etc. The results of the study are relevant both for linguistic research and for improving the development of software applications aimed at processing the Arabic text.