Arabic nominals in HPSG: a verbal noun perspective

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.