Unsupervised induction of Arabic root and pattern lexicons using machine learning

We describe an approach to building a morphological analyser of Arabic by inducing a lexicon of root and pattern templates from an unannotated corpus. Using maximum entropy modelling, we capture orthographic features from surface words, and cluster the words based on the similarity of their possible roots or patterns. From these clusters, we extract root and pattern lexicons, which allows us to morphologically analyse words. Further enhancements are applied, adjusting for morpheme length and structure. Final root extraction accuracy of 87.2% is achieved. In contrast to previous work on unsupervised learning of Arabic morphology, our approach is applicable to naturally-written, unvowelled Arabic text.