Abstract:
Semitic languages exhibit rich nonconcatenative morphological operations, which can generate
a myriad of derived lexemes. Especially, the feature rich, root-driven morphology
in the Arabic language demonstrates the construction of several verbal nouns such as
gerunds, active participles, passive participles, locative nouns, etc. To capture this rich
morphology by natural linguistic processing, the best choice can be Head-driven Phrase
Structure Grammar (HPSG). It combines the best ideas from its predecessors and integrates
all linguistic layers (Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Context etc.) of
natural language processing. Although HPSG is a successful syntactic theory, it lacks the
representation of complex nonconcatenative morphology. In this work, we propose a novel
HPSG representation which includes the morphological, syntactical and semantic features
for Arabic nominals and various verbal nouns. We also present the lexical type hierarchy
and derivational rules for generating these verbal nouns using the HPSG framework. Finally,
we have implemented the lexical type hierarchy, Attribute Value Matrix (AVM) and
construction rules in the TRALE (An extension of the Attribute Logic Engine) platform
to validate the proposed HPSG formalism.
