Al Qamus Al Muhit, a Medieval Arabic Lexicon in LMF
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Al Qamus al Muhit, a Medieval Arabic Lexicon in LMF Ouafae Nahli, Francesca Frontini, Monica Monachini Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “A. Zampolli”, CNR, Pisa [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Fahad Khan Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Universita` di Ca’ Foscari, Venezia Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “A. Zampolli”, CNR, Pisa [email protected], [email protected] Arsalane Zarghili, Mustapha Khalfi Faculte´ des Sciences et Techniques, Universite´ Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah, Fez [email protected], mus.khalfi@gmail.com Abstract This paper describes the conversion into LMF, a standard lexicographic digital format of ’al-qam¯ us¯ al-muh. it¯., a Medieval Arabic lexicon. The lexicon is first described, then all the steps required for the conversion are illustrated. The work is will produce a useful lexicographic resource for Arabic NLP, but is also interesting per se, to study the implications of adapting the LMF model to the Arabic language. Some reflections are offered as to the status of roots with respect to previously suggested representations. In particular, roots are, in our opinion are to be not treated as lexical entries, but modeled as lexical metadata for classifying and identifying lexical entries. In this manner, each root connects all entries that are derived from it. Keywords: Arabic Lexicon, LMF, Al Qamus al Muhit 1. Introduction 2. Background Words in Arabic as in other Semitic languages like Hebrew and Aramaic, are formed in a systematic way on the basis In this article we will describe ongoing work in the con- of consonantal roots. This systematicity in word forma- version of a medieval Arabic lexicon ’al-qam¯ us¯ al-muh. it¯. tion gives us a natural means of categorising and group- into the XML format using the Lexical Markup Framework ing together the lexical entries in the language. For in- (LMF). Our overall aim is to make this historically impor- stance, kataba (“he writes”), maktab (“office”), maktabah tant lexicographic work available in a format that renders (“library”) ’istaktaba (“he wrote for himself”) and kitab¯ the lexical information contained within it more easily ac- (book) are separate lexical entries that are all derived from cessible and especially by NLP applications. The utility of the same root: that is, morphologically they all share the LMF in this case is that it provides a standardized frame- same three consonants that together constitute the root ktb. work for modeling and representing NLP lexicons as has The order of the radical consonants is fixed and therefore been well demonstrated in several previous projects (Fran- we can also speak of the consonantal skeleton. More pre- copoulo 2013). cisely, Arabic words are formed by the attribution of a “scheme” (consisting of vowels and derivational affixes) In the next section we will discuss the different challenges to a root (Moutaouakil, 1989, p. 13). For example, the that arise due to the structure of the Arabic language itself verb kataba “to write is obtained by attributing the ver- and which it is necessary to take into consideration when bal scheme fa’ala to the root ktb, the noun maktab “desk processing Arabic lexicons which are generally structured is formed attributing the scheme maf’al in which the pre- quite differently from lexicons for European languages like fix ma indicates the event location. Therefore each unit English or Italian. We will briefly detail some background is defined by two criteria: a) a morpho-semantic crite- on the ’al-qam¯ us¯ al-muh. it¯. lexicon itself and outline the par- rion, namely, the root and ii) a morpho-syntactic criterion ticular mode of organisation used in that work. We will also namely the scheme (Kouloughli, 1994). On the one hand, describe previous work that has been carried out in devel- words that convey a similar semantic meaning have the oping Arabic language lexica using the LMF format. In same root. On the other hand, all the words that convey the following section we will present the process by which the same “grammatical function” have the same form: the the original text file used as a source for the lexicon was scheme (Cantineau, 1950, Dichy 2002). processed and segmented to extract structured information This property of Arabic makes it extremely useful to be from the original entries and definitions, and how this in- able to classify words using consonantal roots and schemas formation was then represented in LMF compliant entries. since it enables us to capture important kinds of semanti- In doing so, we shall briefly address some open issues with cally relevant information, e.g., in the example above, the respect to the correct representation of Arabic roots as well semantic link that unites maktab, maktabah, and kitab¯ is the as looking forward to our plans for future work. fact that they are, respectively, the event, place and object of 943 the action “write”. In order to make this information more @ which indicates the change of the second radical with- accessible, lexical entries in (printed) Arabic dictionaries out necessarily allowing its identification. We were finally are usually classified according to the root from which they therefore able to segment the text and identify each lexical are derived rather than on the basis of the first character of entry with its definition as in Fig 2. the entry as is usually the case with languages like English Here the commas and the colon serve to separate the dif- or Italian. The proper treatment of roots and schemes is ferent pieces of information: lexical information on the one also important in computational lexicons as we shall later hand, and morphological information on the other. This see. can in most part be automatically derived from some ba- sic background knowledge about Arabic grammar. In Fig- 2.1. The source text ure 2, we present the example of the verb kabura which is We made the decision to work with the Arabic lexicon ’al- equivalent in meaning to the English predicate “grow; to be qam¯ us¯ al-muh. it¯. (AQAM) for a number of reasons but pri- great”. In this instance the main lexical entry (kabura) is marily because of to its authoritative status in the Arabic followed, after a comma separator, by its related masd.ars speaking world and its comprehensiveness in terms of the (in the accusative indefinite form). Lexical information is number of entries contained within it. The original com- placed after the colon, followed by other relevant informa- piler of AQAM, the medieval author ’al-f¯iruz’¯ ab¯ ad¯ ¯i (1329- tion. 1414), states in his introduction to the work that it was cre- Kabura belongs to the fa’ula3 scheme and thus to the ver- ated by merging together several pre-existing dictionaries. bal model that expresses quality or status; all verbs in this For this reason, he gave it the title ’al-qam¯ us¯ (the Ocean) al- class are accompanied by a related adjective that belongs muh. it¯. (Universal). AQAM is widely regarded as the most to the fa’il¯ scheme. In the AQAM, the adjective is always authoritative lexicon of Arabic ever published. Indeed the introduced by fa=huwa “therefore it/he is” and followed by word qam¯ us¯ has even come to supplant the word mungidˇ morphosyntactic information regarding the feminine case (dictionary). As part of the process of compilation, ’al- and possible broken plurals. As this example shows there f¯iruz’¯ ab¯ ad¯ ¯i greatly reduced the original content from the is a lot of implicit information in each entry which we can source dictionaries he was using by eliminating examples, use to determine the most important properties of the lex- Quranic quotations, poetry and some grammatical informa- ical entry in question; this process can in many cases be tion. In the end the fact that AQAM is well structured as automated. a lexicon and the fact that it contains short lexical items In this first phase of the treatment of the text, the segmenta- make it an excellent candidate for conversion into a com- tion is coarse: each block of extracted text represents a sep- putational lexical. arate entry in the lexicon and is tagged as “Unsegmented Traditionally there have been several schools of thought Text”. In the next phase, the resulting text is divided into within Arabic lexicography with respect to the ordering of definitions and lemmata. This latter can consist of a single consonantal roots in the lexicon (Carter, 1990), (Lancioni lemma or a set of lemmata that must be identified. An ex- 1997). AQAM classifies entries initially by the final conso- ample of the formatted text that results from the application nant of the root; this gives an organisation of the (printed) of these two phases can be seen in Fig. 3. lexicon into 28 chapters. Each chapter is then further or- ganised into sub-chapters according to the first consonant 3.2. The LMF standard of the entries contained within. These sub chapters are or- LMF is a model for representing computational lexicons ganised in their turn according to the second consonant of that has the status of an ISO Standard. It was developed the root1. as a joint effort by a team of specialists in computational 3. Processing the text lexicography and natural language processing and has been used in a number of lexicographic projects, and as the input 3.1. First steps format in several NLP applications and tools (Del Grosso Our original source was a digitized version of AQAM cho- et al. 2014). The applicability of LMF to Arabic language sen for its accuracy after comparing the different available resources has been demonstrated in several works, such as online versions with an authoritative paper edition 2.