The Arabic morphological transducer and finite state tools, such as tokenizer and guesser, are developed using finite state technology.
Mohammed A. Attia
Postdoctoral Researcher,
National Centre for Language Technology,
School of Computing,
Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland,
mattia@computing.dcu.ie

Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics, May 2008,
School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures,
The University of Manchester,
Manchester, UK
attia_mohammed@hotmail.com
Mohammed A. Attia
Ph.D. thesis:
Title: Handling Arabic Morphological and Syntactic Ambiguity within the LFG Framework with a View to Machine Translation. [download thesis]
Description: This research investigates different methodologies to manage the problem of morphological and syntactic ambiguities in Arabic. I built an Arabic parser using XLE (Xerox Linguistics Environment) which allows writing grammar rules and notations that follow the LFG formalisms. I also formulate a description of main syntactic structures in Arabic within the LFG framework.

 
A Rule-basic Parser for Modern Standard Arabic
 
 
I developed a rule-based, medium-scale parser for Modern Standard Arabic, using XLE. The output this parser gives is a phrase structure tree (c-structure) and a dependency structure (f-structure). The parser is hosted by Bergen University in Norway. Test the parser here

 
 
Morphological Analyser for Modern Standard Arabic
 
 
I developed a number of useful finite state tools for processing Arabic texts, among which is a morphological analyser. The competitive edge this morphology has over Buckwalter's is that it tried be specialized purely in MSA by avoiding the noise coming from Classical Arabic and the wrong word-clitic formation (reference) which are rampant in Buckwalter's morphology. Read more and download

 

Publications

Papers:

  • Mohammed Attia, Jennifer Foster, Deirdre Hogan, Joseph Le Roux, Lamia Tounsi and Josef van Genabith. 2010. 'Handling Unknown Words in Statistical Latent-Variable Parsing Models for Arabic, English and French'. First Workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages (SPMRL 2010), NAACL HLT. Los Angeles, CA. []
  • Mohammed Attia, Antonio Toral, Lamia Tounsi, Monica Monachini and Josef van Genabith. 2010. 'An automatically built Named Entity lexicon for Arabic'. LREC 2010. Valletta, Malta. []
  • Lamia Tounsi, Mohammed Attia and Josef van Genabith. 2009. 'Parsing Arabic Using Treebank-Based LFG Resources'. LFG09: 14th International LFG Conference, Trinity College, Cambridge, UK. [pdf version]
  • Lamia Tounsi, Mohammed Attia and Josef van Genabith. 2009 'Automatic Treebank-Based Acquisition of Arabic LFG Dependency Structures.' EACL-Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages, Athens, Greece.[pdf version]
  • Mohammed Attia. (2008) 'A Unified Analysis of Copula Constructions in LFG'. LFG08: 13th International LFG Conference, University of Sydney, Australia. [pdf version]
  • Mohammed Attia. (2007) 'Arabic Tokenization System'. ACL-Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages, Prague. [pdf version]
  • Mohammed Attia. (2006) 'An Ambiguity-Controlled Morphological Analyzer for Modern Standard Arabic Modelling Finite State Networks'. The Challenge of Arabic for NLP/MT Conference, October 2006. The British Computer Society, London. [pdf version]
  • Mohammed Attia. (2006) 'Accommodating Multiword Expressions in an Arabic LFG Grammar'. In T. Salakoski et al. (Eds.): FinTAL 2006, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 4139, pp. 87 - 98, 2006. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006. [pdf version]
  • Mohammed Attia. (2005) 'Developing a Robust Arabic Morphological Transducer Using Finite State Technology'. 8th Annual CLUK Research Colloquium, Manchester. [pdf version]

Presentations:

  • Mohammed Attia. (2008) 'From Arabic Handcrafted Grammar to Statistical Parsing'. A presentation at the NCLT, Dublin City University, Ireland.
  • Mohammed Attia. (2008) 'Alternate Agreement in Arabic'. Presented on my behalf in the ParGram Spring Meeting, Istanbul, Turkey.
  • Mohammed Attia. (2005) 'Functional and Anaphoric Control in Arabic'. A presentation at ParGram Fall Meeting, Gotemba, Japan. [Slides available]
  • Mohammed Attia. (2005) 'Accommodating Multiword Expressions in an LFG Grammar'. A presentation at ParGram Fall Meeting, Gotemba, Japan. [Slides available]
  • Mohammed Attia. (2005) 'Developing a Robust Arabic Morphological Transducer/Tokenizer, and Integration with XLE'. Presented on my behalf in the ParGram Spring Meeting, Parc, Palo Alto, USA. [Slides available]
  • Mohammed Attia. (2004) 'Report on the Introduction of Arabic to ParGram'. Presented at ParGram Fall Meeting, Dublin, Ireland. [pdf version]

E-Books:

  • Mohammed Attia. (2003) 'Implications of the Agreement Features in Machine Translation'. M.A. Thesis.
  • Mohammed Attia. (2004) 'Common English Propverbs'. E-Books.
  • Mohammed Attia. (2007) 'Common English Expressions'. E-Books.
  • Mohammed Attia. (2008) 'Handling Arabic Morphological and Syntactic Ambiguity within the LFG Framework with a View to Machine Translation'. Ph.D. Thesis.
  • Mohammed Attia. (2009) 'The Translation Manual'. E-Books.
  • Mohammed Attia. (2009) 'The Translation Terminology Aid'. E-Books.
  • Mohammed Attia. (2009) Pigeon: A Collection of Poems'. E-Books.
  • Mohammed Attia. (2009) Basic English Words: A Vocabulary Bootstrap for Beginning Learners'. E-Books.
  • Mohammed Attia. (2009) 'Arabic Grammar Summary: A Digest of Badawi et. al. 2004 "Modern Written Arabic, A Comprehensive Grammar"'. E-Books.