Semi-Automatic Data Annotation, POS Tagging and Mildly Context-Sensitive Disambiguation: The eXtended Revised AraMorph (XRAM)

An extended and revised form of Tim Buckwalter’s Arabic lexical and morphological resource AraMorph, named eXtended Revised AraMorph (XRAM), is presented. A number of weaknesses and inconsistencies of the original model are addressed by allowing a wider coverage of real-world classical and contemporary (both formal and informal) Arabic texts. Building upon previous research, XRAM enhancements include (i) flag-selectable usage markers, (ii) probabilistic mildly context-sensitive POS tagging, filtering, disambiguation and ranking of alternative morphological analyses, and (iii) semi-automatic increments of lexical coverage through the extraction of lexical and morphological information from existing lexical resources. Testing XRAM through a front-end Python module showed a remarkable success level.