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# Improving Arabic Dependency Parsing with Form-based and Functional Morphological Features

**Authors:** [Yuval Marton](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/yuval-marton/); [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/) · **Year:** 2011 · **Venue:** ACL-HLT 2011 (Proceedings of the 49th ACL), pp. 1586–1596 **Link:** [aclanthology.org/P11-1159](https://aclanthology.org/P11-1159/) · library `aclbulk-2011-marton-improving-arabic-dependency-parsing-form` · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only

[**13** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2112195692) openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14[**8** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/aclbulk-2011-marton-improving-arabic-dependency-parsing-form/) 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/P11-1/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/P11-1159/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/P11-1159.pdf)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2112195692)

**Authors (3)**

1. [Yuval Marton](https://openalex.org/A5048736402) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/3081370) · h 12 · 901 citations · 44 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 56 · 11854 citations · 359 works
3. [Owen Rambow](https://openalex.org/A5021314411) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2054-039X) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1702447) · h 45 · 8876 citations · 420 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex-snapshot (2026-10-14); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The authors ask which morphological features help a transition-based parser (MaltParser, eager algorithm, SVM classifiers) on Modern Standard Arabic. The data are the CATiB dependency trees converted from Penn Arabic Treebank part 3, with features predicted by MADA rather than taken from gold. Nine inflectional features and three lexical ones (undiacritized lemma, root, pattern) are added one at a time, greedily, and in combination. Definiteness, person/number/gender and the undiacritized lemma help most; adding all nine features together hurts, because low-accuracy predictions (case, 86.3%) dominate. Functional gender and number (the "broken plurals" case) and the rationality feature beat surface features: the best CORE 12 setup reaches 80.53% LAS against a 78.68% baseline, and the best setup overall, with the CATiB-EX tagset, reaches 80.83% LAS.

## Ideas

- I1. Gate each predicted feature by its own measured accuracy before it enters the parser: keep a feature only if its prediction accuracy clears a threshold, because the all-features setup failed for that reason. For Hebrew this is a check inside `tools/hbo` before `gparse` receives any predicted tag.
- I2. Measure the undiacritized lemma as a parser feature: the paper's strongest lexical feature is the lemma without vowels, which is exactly what unpointed Hebrew input offers. Compare `gparse` on `tools/hbo` unpointed output with and without a consonantal-lemma feature, using `macula dict` as the lemma source.
- I3. Break the error count down by attachment type (subject, object, idafa, nominal modifier, prepositional) and check that agreement-bound relations improve more than the others. Use this as a diagnostic report for `gparse` runs on `treebanks/hbo/ptnk`.

## For Mova

I1 belongs in `tools/hbo` (the feature gate before `gparse`). I2 is a test for the unpointed mode of `tools/hbo`, with `macula dict` as the lemma source. I3 is a report for `gparse` on `treebanks/hbo/ptnk` and `macula compare`. The paper's Arabic agreement facts are not transferred into [The Noun, the Adjective and the Numeral](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/04-noun/) without first checking them against the Hebrew treebank.

Topics: [Dependency parsing](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/dependency-parsing/) · [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.

```
@inproceedings{marton2011improving,
  title = {{Improving Arabic Dependency Parsing with Form-based and Functional Morphological Features}},
  author = {Marton, Yuval and Habash, Nizar and Rambow, Owen},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies},
  year = {2011},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/P11-1159/}
}
```

- [← previous Morphological Features for Parsing Morphologically-rich Languages: A Case of Arabic](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2011-dehdari-morphological-features-parsing-morphologically-rich/)
- [next → Identifying Broken Plurals, Irregular Gender, and Rationality in Arabic Text](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2012-alkuhlani-identifying-broken-plurals-irregular-gender/)
- [↑ back to Semitic languages](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/sem/)

## References

27 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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