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# Identifying Broken Plurals, Irregular Gender, and Rationality in Arabic Text

**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:** 2012 · **Venue:** EACL 2012 (Proceedings of the 13th EACL), pp. 675–685 **Link:** [aclanthology.org/E12-1069](https://aclanthology.org/E12-1069/) · library `aclbulk-2012-alkuhlani-identifying-broken-plurals-irregular-gender` · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only

[**9** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W36795823) openalex · 2026-10-19[**7** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/aclbulk-2012-alkuhlani-identifying-broken-plurals-irregular-gender/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/E12-1/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/E12-1069/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/E12-1069.pdf)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W36795823)

**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

Arabic words can carry a mismatch between form and function: a broken plural looks singular, and some nouns have a feminine form with masculine agreement, or the reverse. Rationality (human vs non-human) has no morphological mark at all, yet it controls agreement. The authors predict these functional gender, number and rationality values in context, on a corpus of about 16.6K sentences derived from the Penn Arabic Treebank part 3. They compare a maximum-likelihood model with back-off (MLE) against a support-vector sequence tagger (Yamcha), and add orthographic, morphological and syntactic features. MLE is best for words seen in training (97.0% on all three values), Yamcha with syntax is best for unseen words (76.2%), and a combination reaches 94.9% overall, against 89.3% for the MLE baseline.

## Ideas

- I1. Use a back-off chain as the lookup rule for seen words: word form, then lemma plus POS, then POS alone, then the global most common value. Each step is a table, so the whole thing is deterministic and can say which step fired. For `tools/hbo` this is the lookup that runs before any sequence model.
- I2. Enforce one value per word-lemma-POS triple after tagging. The paper's consistency filter is a plain post-pass over the output. In Mova it is a `BTreeMap` pass over the tagged tokens, with no learning needed.
- I3. Report seen and unseen words separately for every morphological table. Here the seen-word score is 97% and the unseen score is 21% for the same lookup. A table that reports only the total would hide this, so [The lexicon](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/10-lexicon/) should state both numbers for any Hebrew table.

## For Mova

I1 and I2 apply to the noun-morphology lookup in `tools/hbo` and to [The Noun, the Adjective and the Numeral](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/04-noun/). I3 is a measurement rule for [The lexicon](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/10-lexicon/). The rationality class is not carried over: it is a feature of Arabic agreement, and Biblical Hebrew would need its own check on `treebanks/hbo/ptnk` first.

## Cite

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

```
@inproceedings{alkuhlani2012identifying,
  title = {{Identifying Broken Plurals, Irregular Gender, and Rationality in Arabic Text}},
  author = {Alkuhlani, Sarah and Habash, Nizar},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2012},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/E12-1069/}
}
```

- [← previous 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/)
- [next → Conversion of Procedural Morphologies to Finite-State Morphologies: A Case Study of Arabic](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2012-hulden-conversion-procedural-morphologies-finite-state/)
- [↑ back to Semitic languages](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/sem/)

## References

29 references, 9 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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2. Imad Al-Sughaiyer and Ibrahim Al-Kharashi. 2004. Arabic Morphological Analysis Techniques: A Comprehensive Survey. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55(3):189–213. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Imad+Al%2DSughaiyer+and+Ibrahim+Al%2DKharashi%2E+2004%2E+Arabic+Morphological+Analysis+Techniques%3A+A+Comprehensive+Survey%2E+Journal+of+the+American+Society+for+Information+Science+and+Technology%2C+55%283%29%3A189%E2%80%93213)
3. Sarah Alkuhlani and Nizar Habash. 2011. A Corpus for Modeling Morpho-Syntactic Agreement in Arabic: Gender, Number and Rationality. In Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’11), Portland, Oregon, USA. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Sarah+Alkuhlani+and+Nizar+Habash%2E+2011%2E+A+Corpus+for+Modeling+Morpho%2DSyntactic+Agreement+in+Arabic%3A+Gender%2C+Number+and+Rationality%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+49th+Annual+Meeting+of+the+Association+for+Com) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2011-alkuhlani-corpus-modeling-morpho-syntactic-agreement/)
4. Mohamed Altantawy, Nizar Habash, Owen Rambow, and Ibrahim Saleh. 2010. Morphological Analysis and Generation of Arabic Nouns: A Morphemic Functional Approach. In Proceedings of the seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Valletta, Malta. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Mohamed+Altantawy%2C+Nizar+Habash%2C+Owen+Rambow%2C+and+Ibrahim+Saleh%2E+2010%2E+Morphological+Analysis+and+Generation+of+Arabic+Nouns%3A+A+Morphemic+Functional+Approach%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+seventh+Internation) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lingbulk-2010-altantawy-morphological-analysis-generation-arabic-nouns/)
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