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# A Corpus for Modeling Morpho-Syntactic Agreement in Arabic: Gender, Number and Rationality

**Authors:** [Sarah Alkuhlani](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/sarah-alkuhlani/); [Nizar Habash](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/nizar-habash/) · **Year:** 2011 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (short papers) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/P11-2062](https://aclanthology.org/P11-2062/) · library `aclbulk-2011-alkuhlani-corpus-modeling-morpho-syntactic-agreement` · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only

[**51** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2106178373) openalex · 2026-10-19[**31** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/aclbulk-2011-alkuhlani-corpus-modeling-morpho-syntactic-agreement/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/P11-2/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/P11-2062/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/P11-2062.pdf)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2106178373)

**Authors (2)**

1. [Sarah Alkuhlani](https://openalex.org/A5047896985) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2706174) · h 4 · 164 citations · 8 works
2. [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

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

## What it is about

The authors add manually annotated functional features to the nominals of PATB part 3: gender, number and rationality (human or not), as opposed to the form-based features the affixes show. To keep annotation tractable they annotate about 21,148 normalised forms and 15,720 lemmas instead of about 197K nominal tokens. Inter-annotator agreement on known-lemma words is 94.5% for token gender, 99.7% for number and 95.1% for rationality (Kappa 0.89, 0.99 and 0.92). In a CATiB bigram analysis, simple form-based equality agrees with only 66.7% of noun-adjective and verb-subject bigrams. Complex agreement rules on functional features give 93.6%. After a manual error review of 379 lemmas, the figure rises to 95.7%. About half of the disagreements the manual review examined turned out to be annotation errors.

## Ideas

- I1. Keep two layers for each noun: the form-based features (what the word shows) and the function-based features (what it does in agreement). Derive the form layer from the MACULA morphology and add the function layer as a lexicon field.
- I2. Use agreement as a test oracle: a rule check over trees for noun-adjective and verb-subject agreement, reported per bigram type next to the simple-equality baseline. The check finds suspect annotations in the treebanks before any model is trained on them.
- I3. Store a lexical human/non-human class per lemma once and let the agreement rules read it. The rationality rule itself is specific to Arabic, but the lexical class is reusable.

## For Mova

I1 goes into [The Noun, the Adjective and the Numeral](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/04-noun/) and `tools/macula`. I2 is a validation step in `tools/macula` and in the `world` checks over trees. I3 goes into `prag` and [The lexicon](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/10-lexicon/). The corpus itself is available only through the authors and the LDC, so nothing from it is carried into Mova.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```
@inproceedings{alkuhlani2011corpus,
  title = {{A Corpus for Modeling Morpho-Syntactic Agreement in Arabic: Gender, Number and Rationality}},
  author = {Alkuhlani, Sarah and Habash, Nizar},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies},
  year = {2011},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/P11-2062/}
}
```

- [← previous Improving Arabic Dependency Parsing with Lexical and Inflectional Morphological Features](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2010-marton-improving-arabic-dependency-parsing-lexical/)
- [next → An Open-Source Finite State Morphological Transducer for Modern Standard Arabic](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2011-attia-open-source-finite-state-morphological/)
- [↑ back to Semitic languages](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/sem/)

## References

19 references, 5 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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