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Comparative Study for Recent Technologies in Arabic Language Parsing

Conference Paper · June 2019

DOI: 10.1109/SDS.2019.8768587

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 Comparative Study for Recent Technologies in
Arabic Language Parsing
Darah Aqel, Shadi AlZu’bi, and Siham Hamadah
Alzaytoonah University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan
{d.aqel, smalzubi, siham}@zuj.edu.jo
Abstract - Parsing the natural language is an interesting issue
for many of natural language processing (NLP) applications.
Parsing a complex language such as Arabic represents a
challenging task for many researchers. Arabic is a complex
language due to the rich morphology and the complicated
structure of its sentences, since it contains difficult linguistic
features. This comparative study discusses the existing and the
developed Arabic parsing systems, we describe here current
technologies which are employed for parsing Arabic text. A
comparison between several parsing systems is proposed in this
paper as well, by stating the key features and limitations for
each of them. Finally, solutions to address the main limitations
of these Arabic parsing systems have been suggested.
Keywords— Natural Language Processing, Arabic Language
Processing, Arabic Parsing, Syntactic Parsing, Constituency
Parsing, Dependency Parsing
I. INTRODUCTION
Natural language processing (NLP) has recently gained an
increasing interest from many research fields [1]. NLP has many
applications such as parsing [2], sentiment analysis [3], grammar
rules induction [4], and machine translation [5]. Constituency
parsing is one of the most significant NLP tasks, it is based on
determining the syntactic structure of a sentence based on a set of
grammatical rules. Parsing is based on step-by-step parts of the
speech (POS) tagging, which assigns the right POS (e.g. noun, verb,
adjective…) tag to each word in the text. Additionally, it is a
prerequisite step for a deeper NLP task such as semantic analysis
including word sense disambiguation, sentiment analysis, and co-
reference resolution [1].
Parsing systems need to learn the syntax of the modeled language
to classify newly seen sentences. Recently, research into parsing for
English language has achieved successful results, different
constituency parsing systems for English have been implemented
to process and parse English text effectively. However, adapting
the available parsing systems to other languages such as Arabic has
faced many challenges.
Previous works in the domain of parsing Arabic language have
shown that this language is highly ambiguous and difficult to parse.
Generally, Arabic language is characterized by its rich morphology,
the complex syntax of Arabic natural language has gained much
attention by researches in the last decade, some state-of-the-art
systems have been developed to process this complex language
automatically and deeply.
The research in this paper focuses in introducing an overview and
a comprehensive study for the current state of theoretical research
on parsing Arabic language and reports the approaches and systems
that have been developed for parsing this language. A comparison
between Arabic parsing systems has been presented as well to show
the main features, limitations, and challenges. Finally, suggestions
and solutions for addressing the main limitations of the current
Arabic parsing systems have been proposed, and prospects for
future improvements of these systems are also provided.
The remaining of this paper is organized as follows. Section II
provides a literature review on the current studies for parsing
Arabic language. It also presents a comparison between the
common systems developed for parsing Arabic text by identifying
the main characteristics and limitations for each of these systems.
Section III presents a detailed discussion based on the conducted
review, and suggests the possible solutions for handling the major
limitations of the current Arabic parsing systems in the future.
Section 4 concludes the work in this paper.
II. RELATED LITERATURE
Researches on Arabic language processing began in the 1970’s.
The current technologies and trends of Arabic NLP emphasize on
text parsing. Generally, there are several open source NLP tools and
parsers that can be applied for parsing Arabic text such as the
Stanford parser1, FARASA: Advanced Tools for Arabic2, NLTK3,
and Stanford coreNLP4. Furthermore, a great effort was done by
many researchers to develop text parsers for parsing Arabic
language. The main concern for most of these researchers was to
provide a clear syntactic analysis of the Arabic text, and produce a
full representation of the grammatical relations between the words
in sentences, such as identifying Arabic verbal and nominal
sentences in text.
For example, the study demonstrated in [10] develops an Arabic
parser, called A'reb, which performs a lexical and syntactic analysis
for the Arabic sentences. The developed parser includes the main
Arabic grammar rules for verbal sentences and can be extended to
any Arabic sentence. The authors in [10] stated that the developed
Arabic parser has some limitations and requires more work to be
completed.
The authors in [11] introduce a model for parsing Arabic sentences
in general and the Quranic Arabic sentences in specific based on
using Natural language toolkit (NLTK). This model builds a
context-free grammar (CFG) and invokes the NLTK recursive-
descent parser. It performs some of the NLP tasks and generates
parsing trees for Arabic sentences. The authors mentioned that their
approach does not perform a deeper processing task such as
specifying the parsing dependencies for Arabic sentences.
The study presented in [12] constructs a CFG and presents an
Arabic parser to parse the Arabic sentences based on the
constructed CFG. In particular, the NLTK recursive descent parser,
which is based on a top-down strategy, was used to check whether
the syntax of an Arabic sentence is grammatically right. To test the
performance of the parser, a corpus of 150 Arabic sentences was
used in the experiments. The parser achieved a high accuracy of
95% in parsing verbal and nominal sentences. However, the study
also showed that some sentences were not properly parsed.
 TABLE 1. A Comparison between some Arabic Parsing Systems
Reference The Proposed Achievements Limitations and Demerits of the Approach
Approach
A'reb Arabic parser Parsing Arabic verbal • The approach does not parse the rest of the verbal and nominal
10 and nominal sentences.
sentences • It does not perform any Arabic grammar correction process
• It does not take into account the diacritics of words.
• It does not perform a semantic analysis of the text, where this
causes errors that are related to the improper use of semantic
meaning
NLTK recursive- Parsing Arabic and • The approach does not perform a deeper processing task such as
11 descent parser Quranic sentences specifying the parsing dependencies for the Arabic sentences.
+ building a new CFG • The parser sometime may go to an infinite loop.
for Arabic sentences • The parser tests all words and grammar rules even that they are
inappropriate to the input sentence and this maximizes its time
complexity.
• The parser does not keep the successfully parsed segments and
therefore it repeats much of its work.
NLTK recursive- Parsing Arabic verbal • Some sentences were not properly parsed by their parser and this
12 descent parser and nominal is due to:
+ building a new CFG sentences - The incorrect POS tagging of some words.
for Arabic sentences - The complexity in ordering some sentences.
- Some input sentences did not match the right CFG
production rules.
Bel-Arabi Parsing Arabic verbal • Inability to perform grammar correction.
13 Arabic grammar and nominal • Inability to perform a semantic analysis of the text.
analyzer system sentences • Incapability to differentiate between Arabic active and passive
verbs.
Transducers parser Parsing and • Some sentences have been partially disambiguated due to the
annotating Arabic lack of semantic rules and the inability to identify some rules by
14 nominal and verbal the approach.
sentences • Some sentences were not properly parsed by the parser and this is
due to:
- The incorrect POS tagging of some words.
- Some sentences have been failed to be disambiguated
by the approach due to the lack of some information in
the used dictionaries.
ILP method called ILA Parsing Arabic • The approach was inaccurate in parsing some nominal sentences.
15 nominal and verbal
sentences
An Arabic parser that Parsing Arabic • The approach was applied for parsing the Arabic nominal
16 uses CFG and classical nominal sentences sentences only, not the verbal ones.
grammar rules. • The failures happened by the approach in parsing some sentences
are due to the improper POS tagging and segmentations tasks.
a top-down chart Arabic Parsing Arabic • The approach is unable to recognize passive or active voice
parser +CFG nominal and verbal verbs.
17 sentences • It does not take into account the diacritics of words.
• It does not identify more than one linked pronoun in the word.
• It does not distinguish the particles that are used to describe two
present verbs in the sentence.
A top-down Arabic Parsing Arabic • Some sentences have been wrongly parsed by the parser due to
23 parser with a recursive sentences the incompatibility between the words’ attributes.
transition +CFG • The parser has failed to parse 11 sentences, since it was unable to
associate any rule to these input sentences.
A parsing system based Parsing Arabic • The approach has incorrectly classified some Arabic relative
2 on some rules obtained relative clauses in sentences due to the incorrect POS tagging of some relative
by an ILP method called Arabic sentences pronouns in the Arabic sentences that have relative clauses.
ALEPH

The research discussed in [13] proposes an Arabic grammar
analyzer system, called Bel-Arabi, which covers the main grammar
rules for Arabic nominal and verbal sentences. The proposed
grammar analyzer achieved promising results in analyzing 600
Arabic sentences. Yet, the research also showed that developed
analyzer had some restrictions and challenges that affected on the
process of parsing the sentences.
Moreover, the authors in [14] introduced a parsing approach for
parsing Arabic nominal sentences using transducers. They
implemented a set of lexical and syntactic rules for Arabic
language. Their approach also allowed the parsing and the
annotation of verbal sentences. By using a corpus of 200 sentences,
their approach achieved satisfactory results, where the precision
rate was 80% and the recall rate was 90%.
The researchers in [15] propose a study that applies an inductive
logic programming (ILP) method called Inductive Learning
Algorithm (ILA) to identify the nominal and verbal sentences in the
Arabic text. The applied ILP method produces a set of parsing rules
from a training dataset, where these rules can be then used for
parsing Arabic nominal and verbal sentences. Their method
achieved very good accuracy results of 92%. However, the
experimental results of their method showed that it was accurate
and efficient in classifying the verbal sentences more than the
nominal ones, where the nominal sentences have several
formulations in comparison to the verbal ones.
The study suggested in [16] describes a method for parsing Arabic
nominal sentences based on the use of CFG and some rules of
classical grammar. By testing this method on a corpus of 200
Arabic nominal sentences, the achieved accuracy was 97%. This
study showed that the most of failures that happened by the method
in parsing some nominal sentences were resulting from the
improper POS tagging and segmentations tasks. The future of this
study was to improve and expand the method to parse Arabic verbal
sentences as well.
The authors in [17] proposed a top-down chart Arabic parser for
parsing Arabic nominal and verbal sentences. The authors first used
CFG to develop Arabic grammar rules, CFG provides an accurate
description of the grammatical structure of the Arabic sentences.
Then they implemented the top-down chart parser which associates
the grammatical structure to the input sentences. To measure the
performance of the parser, a set of 70 Arabic nominal and verbal
sentences, taken from real documents, was used in the experiments
of the parser. The experimental results showed that the parser was
efficient in parsing both Arabic nominal and verbal sentences,
where it achieved an overall accuracy of 94.3%.
Bataineh and colleague developed in [23] an Arabic parser based
on the use of a top-down parsing method with a recursive transition
network for parsing Arabic sentences. They firstly generated
Arabic grammar rules by building a CFG, and then represented
these rules using transition networks. The developed parser was
tested on a real dataset of 90 Arabic sentences, where 85.6% of
these sentences were parsed correctly.
The authors in [2] developed a parsing system that parses Arabic
sentences to identify relative clauses in these sentences. Their
system performed a deeper dependency parsing task based on some
linguistic grammar rules for Arabic relative clauses learned by an
ILP machine learning method, called ALEPH. To assess the
performance of the system empirically, a corpus of some Arabic
sentences, taken from Quran, was given to the system for
processing. The system parsed these Arabic sentences and
identified the relative clauses in these sentences as well. The
experiments of the system achieved an overall accuracy of 83%. In
general, the results obtained out from their research were
satisfactory and proved that implementing ILP for parsing Arabic
relative clauses will gain a promising contribution in the field of
Arabic NLP.
The authors in [24] propose baselines for three existing parsing
models. They have also developed a manually annotated grammar
for Arabic and evaluated it to test the performance of Arabic
constituency parsing and improve its results. The authors have
shown in their study that the performance of Arabic constituency
parsing remains much poorer and lower than English. The study
illustrated in [25] applies a statistical parsing approach that uses the
Pen Arabic Treebank (PATB) [26] (an Arabic linguistic resource)
to construct a parsing model for parsing Arabic sentences and
generating the parse trees for them. In the performance experiments
of the approach, the statistical parser was trained using a dataset of
22000 Arabic sentences (taken from PATB) and tested using a
different gold standard dataset of 2000 Arabic sentences (also taken
from PATB). The achieved parsing performance results were a
precision of 82.4%, a recall of 86.6%, and an F-measure of 84.4%.
Different Arabic parsing systems were demonstrated above in the
literature. Table 1 displays a comparison between some of these
systems, showing and summarizing their merits and limitations.
III. DETAILED DISCUSSION BASED ON
THE CONDUCTED REVIEW
As described before, text parsing aims to specify the syntactic
structure and the grammatical relations for the sentences'
constituents. Therefore, the grammar checking process is
considered a major part in the parsing task. In fact, grammar
checking, and parsing are both challenging tasks in Arabic
language, where each constituent in this language needs a deeper
analysis and a wide study [7, 8].
The current literature in the field of Arabic NLP shows that there is
a lack in the research related to the subject of parsing Arabic
language, as very few attempts and efforts have been carried out for
developing an effective parsing system for Arabic. Furthermore,
there is still no public parser available for Arabic with sufficiently
wide coverage. Indeed, there are various reasons and factors that lie
behind these issues and explain the challenges that face the
development of automatic parsing systems. Some of these reasons
are: the rich morphology of Arabic language, the difficult syntax of
its sentences, the length of its sentences, the free order of words in
Arabic sentences, the unique linguistic characteristics of the
language, the complicated word formation task of roots, the
omission of diacritics in the written Arabic text, absence of regular
punctuation marks, and the presence of elliptic personal pronouns.
In addition to that, there is a lack in the availability of Arabic
linguistic resources such as having a large manually annotated
Arabic corpus. We cannot also exclude the problem of syntactic
and semantic disambiguation of the Arabic words from these
reasons and factors that limit the research related to Arabic
language parsing [6, 7, 8, 9].
There are several approaches that have been developed for parsing
Arabic text. However, the methodology used in this research
discussed and selected the most 10 recent approaches for parsing
Arabic language (see Table 1). These 10 approaches have been
chosen for illustration purposes and for showing the feasibility of
this comparative study, but more Arabic parsing approaches could
also be selected and included in this study where necessary.
Moreover, all of the selected approaches are representative of the
latest approaches that perform the task of constituency parsing for
Arabic language. In addition, most of the selected parsing
approaches in this study perform constituency parsing and do not
perform a deeper parsing task such as dependency parsing for
Arabic text. This issue represents one of the main limitations of the
current systems developed for parsing Arabic language.
Furthermore, the comprehensive study made in this research has
also shown that the current existing systems for parsing the Arabic
language have some other limitations (e.g. [10 - 23, 2]). As a result,
these limitations may cause low performance results of the Arabic
parsing systems in case the size of the corpus was increased or the
used corpus was changed to another one. Hence, the future
perspectives in the research field related to Arabic language parsing
should focus on improving the existing Arabic parsing systems and
solving all the previously mentioned limitations of these systems.
 One way to solve some of these limitations is to focus more on
enhancing the performance of the used Arabic POS taggers. Where
by assigning the right POS tag (by these POS taggers) to each word
in the text, the accuracy of the parsers will then increase, and more
sentences will be parsed precisely. Furthermore, we should draw
the attention of a lot of researchers towards performing a deeper
dependency parsing and a semantic analysis of the Arabic text. All
of these aspects will then motivate and help the NLP researchers to
resolve many issues such as the syntactic and semantic ambiguity
of words, parsing more Arabic sentences accurately, performing a
proper grammar correction for the Arabic sentences, and
supporting the automatic diacritics of Arabic words.
IV. CONCLUSION
The process of parsing Arabic sentences is complex, it requires a
wide research and analysis to develop an efficient parser suitable
for the rich morphology and the difficult linguistic characteristics
for the Arabic language. This paper provided an inclusive review
of the existing approaches and systems developed for parsing
Arabic text. In addition, it illustrated the merits, limitations, and
challenges of these systems. This study is also presented
suggestions and future perspectives for building effective parsing
systems suitable for Arabic text, it helps in improving the
performance of current existing parsers by addressing the main
limitations of these parsers. As a conclusion for NLP researches
who are targeting efficient parser for Arabic, they are advised to
consider the semantic analysis to resolve the problem of words
ambiguity, errors in the parsing process of the sentences could be
avoided. Moreover, the future work related to the field of parsing
Arabic language should focus more on enhancing the used Arabic
POS taggers, improving Arabic grammar correction process in
parsers, and supporting the process of parsing dependencies more
deeply. It should also take into consideration the diacritics of words
in the written Arabic text.
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