Syntactic Generation of Arabic in Interlingua-based Machine Translation Framework

Arabic is a highly inflectional language, with a rich morphology, relatively free word order, and two types of sentences: nominal and verbal. Arabic natural language processing in general is still underdeveloped and Arabic natural language generation (NLG) is even less developed. In particular, Arabic natural language generation from Interlingua was only investigated using template-based approaches. Moreover, tools used for other languages are not easily adaptable to Arabic due to the Arabic language complexity at both the morphological and syntactic levels. In this paper, we report our attempt at developing a rule-based Arabic generator for task-oriented interlingua-based spoken dialogues. Examples of syntactic generation results from the Arabic generator will be given and will illustrate how the system works. Our proposed syntactic generator has been effectively evaluated using real test data and achieved satisfactory results.