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# Morphological Analysis and Generation of Arabic Nouns: A Morphemic Functional Approach

**Authors:** Mohamed Altantawy; [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/); Ibrahim Saleh · **Year:** 2010 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/L10-1305](https://aclanthology.org/L10-1305/) · library `lingbulk-2010-altantawy-morphological-analysis-generation-arabic-nouns` · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) (ELRA, LREC proceedings) — summary only

[**36** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W19466851) openalex · 2026-10-19[**13** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/lingbulk-2010-altantawy-morphological-analysis-generation-arabic-nouns/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/L10-1/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L10-1305/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L10-1305.pdf)
- [DOI 10.63317/3vrjobab8jnv](https://doi.org/10.63317/3vrjobab8jnv)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W19466851)

**Authors (4)**

1. [Mohamed Altantawy](https://openalex.org/A5065536183) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2721024) · h 4 · 73 citations · 10 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
3. [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
4. Ibrahim Saleh [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/145450583)

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

## What it is about

MAGEAD is a morphological analyser and generator for Arabic built as finite-state transducers. It maps a lexeme and feature-value pairs to a surface form and back. This paper ports it from verbs to Modern Standard Arabic nominals, which are harder because of broken plurals and irregular feminines. A lexeme is a root, a morphological behaviour class (MBC) and a meaning index. The MBC hierarchy has 962 classes for 32,110 nouns, with inheritance, so a mapping shared by all words, such as the conjunction clitic, is stated once. Morphology is spread over five tiers (pattern and affixes, root, vocalism, phonology, orthography), and morphophonemic and orthographic rules are kept apart. On 4,188 word tokens of the Penn Arabic Treebank Part 3, the system gives no analysis for 243 tokens, and precision and recall are in the 90s for most feature sets. When gender, number, case and state are compared too, scores fall to about 47–54%; the authors trace most of the remaining errors to the gold standard and to the gap between form-based and functional gender and number.

## Ideas

- I1. Inherit rather than repeat: the Hebrew prefix clitics (ה, ו, ב, כ, ל, מ, ש and their combinations) apply to every noun, pronoun and particle. Store the mapping once in a class hierarchy with inheritance, and let each class inherit it.
- I2. The lemma convention: the lemma is the singular citation form of one lexeme, and a derivational difference makes a new lexeme. Use it when `macula dict` picks lemmas, so that derived nouns are not merged into their base.
- I3. Classify every disagreement before fixing anything: label each one as gold error, rule error or lexicon error, as the paper does (it finds only about 18% of precision errors are real). Print that split for every `macula compare` run against UD PTNK.
- I4. Report scores with and without the final vowel point and with the lexeme only. The paper uses this to show that the output is not over-generating. Use the same three views for `tools/hbo`, pointed and unpointed.

## For Mova

I1 goes into [Pronouns, particles and prepositions](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/05-pronouns-particles/) and [The Noun, the Adjective and the Numeral](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/04-noun/). I2 is a lemma rule for `macula dict`. I3 is a reporting rule for `macula compare`. I4 is a metric view for `tools/hbo`.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.63317/3vrjobab8jnv](https://doi.org/10.63317/3vrjobab8jnv)

```
@inproceedings{altantawy2010morphological,
  title = {{Morphological Analysis and Generation of Arabic Nouns: A Morphemic Functional Approach}},
  author = {Altantawy, Mohamed and Habash, Nizar and Rambow, Owen and Saleh, Ibrahim},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)},
  year = {2010},
  doi = {10.63317/3vrjobab8jnv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3vrjobab8jnv}
}
```

- [← previous Roots & patterns vs. stems plus grammar-lexis specifications: on what basis should a multilingual database centred on Arabic be built?](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lingbulk-2003-dichy-roots-patterns-vs-stems-plus/)
- [next → Morphological Annotation of Quranic Arabic](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lingbulk-2010-dukes-morphological-annotation-quranic-arabic/)
- [↑ back to Semitic languages](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/sem/)

## References

21 references, 4 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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