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# Morphological Features for Parsing Morphologically-rich Languages: A Case of Arabic

**Authors:** Jon Dehdari; [Lamia Tounsi](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/lamia-tounsi/); [Josef van Genabith](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/josef-van-genabith/) · **Year:** 2011 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages **Link:** [aclanthology.org/W11-3802](https://aclanthology.org/W11-3802/) · library `aclbulk-2011-dehdari-morphological-features-parsing-morphologically-rich` · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only

[**11** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W179203483) openalex · 2026-10-19[**8** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/aclbulk-2011-dehdari-morphological-features-parsing-morphologically-rich/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/W11-38/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W11-3802/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W11-3802.pdf)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W179203483)

**Authors (3)**

1. [Jon Dehdari](https://openalex.org/A5057722634) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2871896) · h 8 · 335 citations · 18 works
2. [Lamia Tounsi](https://openalex.org/A5000678794) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1863231) · h 12 · 788 citations · 39 works
3. [Josef van Genabith](https://openalex.org/A5049194403) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1322-7944) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/7519068) · h 38 · 5517 citations · 366 works

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

## What it is about

Dehdari, Tounsi and van Genabith ask which morphological features, folded into the POS tag, help a PCFG latent-annotation parser (a re-implemented Berkeley parser) on the Penn Arabic Treebank, using the ATB3-v3.2 80/10/10 split. Of the 498 full ATB tags, they identify 15 features that can be included or excluded, giving 32,768 combinations, too many to try all. They compare non-iterative search, greedy search, a merged heuristic, best-first search with backtracking, and simulated annealing (mean dev F 82.84, standard deviation 0.21 over 50 runs). Backtracking finds the best set: genitive clitics, proper noun, negation and determiner. The conclusion reports F 85.03 for vocalized and 83.34 for unvocalized no-tag parsing, with product models and unknown-word signature classes. Case helped gold parsing but not predicted parsing, and the authors conclude that no tagset is best for every task.

## Ideas

- I1. A deterministic best-first search with backtracking over Mova's feature sets for `gparse`, with ordered sets (BTreeSet) and a two-run determinism check. Skip simulated annealing, which is random and costly.
- I2. Unknown-word signature classes: map unseen tokens to a small set of classes by prefix, suffix and shape heuristics. For Hebrew this could use the common prefix letters, the suffixes ים and ות, and the noun shapes from the noun chapter. Measure it on held-out unseen tokens.
- I3. The merged heuristic M(f) = (S_top − S_not-f) + (S_f − S_bottom): a cheap way to rank features from two single-feature passes, used to order the trials of I1.

## For Mova

I1 is an experiment plan for `tools/hbo` and `gparse`, to be run on dev before any claim. I2 goes into the unknown-word handling of `tools/hbo` (unpointed mode) and into [The Noun, the Adjective and the Numeral](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/04-noun/). I3 is the ordering rule for the search in I1.

## Cite

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

```
@inproceedings{dehdari2011morphological,
  title = {{Morphological Features for Parsing Morphologically-rich Languages: A Case of Arabic}},
  author = {Dehdari, Jon and Tounsi, Lamia and Genabith, Josef van},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages},
  year = {2011},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W11-3802/}
}
```

- [← previous 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/)
- [next → Improving Arabic Dependency Parsing with Form-based and Functional Morphological Features](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2011-marton-improving-arabic-dependency-parsing-form/)
- [↑ back to Semitic languages](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/sem/)

## References

29 references, 8 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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