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# Parsing Arabic Dialects

**Authors:** [David Chiang](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/david-chiang/); [Mona Diab](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/mona-diab/); [Nizar Habash](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/nizar-habash/); [Owen Rambow](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/owen-rambow/); Safiullah Shareef · **Year:** 2006 · **Venue:** 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics **Link:** [aclanthology.org/E06-1047](https://aclanthology.org/E06-1047/) · library `aclbulk-2006-chiang-parsing-arabic-dialects` · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only

[**110** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W1957504465) openalex · 2026-10-19[**58** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/aclbulk-2006-chiang-parsing-arabic-dialects/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/E06-1/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/E06-1047/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/E06-1047.pdf)
- [DOI 10.7916/d85t3tzg](https://doi.org/10.7916/d85t3tzg)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W1957504465)

**Authors (5)**

1. [David Chiang](https://openalex.org/A5036026526) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0435-4864) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/145287425) · h 31 · 6918 citations · 162 works
2. [Mona Diab](https://openalex.org/A5038581447) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7696-1436) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1700007) · h 48 · 11047 citations · 293 works
3. [Nizar Habash](https://openalex.org/A5084517393) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1831-3457) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1696645) · h 57 · 12233 citations · 359 works
4. [Owen Rambow](https://openalex.org/A5021314411) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2054-039X) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1702447) · h 46 · 9290 citations · 420 works
5. [Safiullah Shareef](https://openalex.org/A5069196655) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/138916484) · h 2 · 121 citations · 2 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex (2026-10-19); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

Levantine Arabic (LA) is spoken, unwritten, and has almost no treebank, while MSA has the Penn Arabic Treebank (about 17,600 training sentences). The authors parse transcribed LA without any LA training treebank and without a parallel LA–MSA corpus, using only a small LA–MSA lexicon and explicit knowledge of how the two differ. They try three routes: translate the LA sentence into MSA and parse it (sentence transduction); rewrite the MSA treebank into an LA-like treebank and train on it (treebank transduction); and rewrite the MSA grammar of a synchronous tree-substitution grammar into an LA grammar (grammar transduction). On the LA test set, grammar transduction is best: labelled F1 rises from 53.5 to 60.2 without POS tags (+6.7) and from 60.2 to 67.1 with gold tags (+6.9). The negation rule helps; the verb-subject-object reordering and the demonstrative rule do not; the morphological rules do not help. The paper has no treebank of LA beyond a 33,000-word development and test set.

## Ideas

- I1. Grammar transduction applied to a sister variety: keep the parent-language trees and add a small set of explicit rewrites (here: negation as a postverbal particle, and a lexically specific construction for "want"). For Mishnaic Hebrew, the same kind of rewrite on the Biblical PTNK trees (negative particles, a "want/need" construction) would give a first Mishnaic treebank without new annotation; the rules would be a table in `tools/macula`.
- I2. Ablation by rule: each transformation is tested alone and in combination on the development set, and only those that help are kept. The paper shows which rules hurt (reordering, demonstrative switching, morphology) even though they were linguistically motivated. Use the same discipline for `languages/arc-x-targum/` and `languages/tmr/` before any rewrite enters the release.
- I3. Start the lexicon small: the 321-entry list of closed-class words and frequent items gave most of the gain, and the 1,560-entry extension added ambiguity that lowered F1 with gold tags. For a Biblical-to-Mishnaic (or Aramaic) pair table, measure each addition on held-out verses before keeping it.

## For Mova

I1 belongs in [11. Mishnaic Hebrew (hbo-x-mishnaic)](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/11-mishnaic/) as a plan for a Mishnaic treebank built from PTNK; the negative particles of I1 go into [Pronouns, particles and prepositions](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/05-pronouns-particles/). I2 is a rule for the transduction step itself, to be written into [11. Mishnaic Hebrew (hbo-x-mishnaic)](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/11-mishnaic/). I3 is a measurement for [The lexicon](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/10-lexicon/).

Topics: [Treebanks](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/treebanks/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.7916/d85t3tzg](https://doi.org/10.7916/d85t3tzg)

```
@inproceedings{chiang2006parsing,
  title = {{Parsing Arabic Dialects}},
  author = {Chiang, David and Diab, Mona and Habash, Nizar and Rambow, Owen and Shareef, Safiullah},
  booktitle = {11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2006},
  doi = {10.7916/d85t3tzg},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.7916/d85t3tzg}
}
```

- [← previous Arabic Diacritization Using Weighted Finite-State Transducers](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2005-nelken-arabic-diacritization-weighted-finite-state/)
- [next → MAGEAD: A Morphological Analyzer and Generator for the Arabic Dialects](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2006-habash-magead-morphological-analyzer-generator-arabic/)
- [↑ back to Semitic languages](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/sem/)

## References

17 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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10. Mohamed Maamouri, Ann Bies, Tim Buckwalter, Mona Diab, Nizar Habash, Owen Rambow, and Dalila Tabessi. 2006. Developing and using a pilot dialectal Arabic treebank. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC’06, page to appear, Genoa, Italy. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Mohamed+Maamouri%2C+Ann+Bies%2C+Tim+Buckwalter%2C+Mona+Diab%2C+Nizar+Habash%2C+Owen+Rambow%2C+and+Dalila+Tabessi%2E+2006%2E+Developing+and+using+a+pilot+dialectal+Arabic+treebank%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+Fifth+Internat)
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