Morpho-lexical ambiguities in the recognition of written Arabic word-forms, evidence from the DIINAR.1 lexical resource

This paper tackles the issue of the ambiguities that are generated by the morpho-lexical system of Arabic, and not only by the fact that the standard writing of the language is 'unvowelled'. Evidence is drawn from the Arabic monolingual DIINAR.1 lexical resource (section II). Authors focus on morpho-lexical ambiguities, which are considered successively in vowelled and unvowelled writing. For lack of space, and in order to ensure consistency in the presentation of data, all the examples belong to verb structures. Statistical results are given, as to the level of ambiguity of prefix/suffix combinations and that of pre-stem/post-stem combinations. Percentage results are also given concerning the number of stems that are found in the conjugation of verbs. The numbers of stems that are related either to a single verb, or to two verbs or more, are also analysed. Statistical results are given, in addition, for stem-verb-root relations. Evidence from vowelled and from unvowelled realisations of stems, verbs and word-forms is proposed. Root recognition is finally examined, and the results obtained by queries in the DIINAR.1 lexical resource are compared - on this point - to those of the morphological analysis of a corpus of 2 million word occurrences (al-©ayāt newspaper, year 1995).