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The Architecture of a Standard Arabic Lexical Database. Some Figures, Ratios and Categories from the DIINAR.1 Source Program

Paper · 2004 · Ramzi Abbès, Joseph Dichy and Mohamed Hassoun

Summary

The paper tackles a gap in Arabic language resources: there were no agreed criteria for judging whether a Standard Arabic lexical database is complete and consistent. The authors analyse the DIINAR.1 database, which works at word-form level for morphological analysis and generation. They separate two things often conflated as the "lexical database": the source program of lemma-entries with their grammar-lexis specifiers, and the lexica of inflected forms generated from it. They recall the Arabic word-form model, a nucleus formative (stem = root + pattern, or quasi-stem) surrounded by extension formatives (proclitics, prefix, suffixes, enclitics). A word-formatives grammar (WFG) governs which combinations are licensed, and some of the original part-of-speech categories are revisited. They then count entries and generated forms per category. About 131,087 stems yield roughly 7.77 million inflected forms, a ratio near 59:1, which they compare with Xerox Spanish. They argue that such ratios stay stable while lemma counts drift over time, so the ratios can serve as language-specific validation criteria for Arabic lexica.

Key points

  • DIINAR.1 contains 6,546 roots. The stems include 19,457 verbs, 70,702 deverbals and 39,099 nouns/adjectives (with broken plurals).
  • Generated forms per category:
    • verbs: 3,060,716 forms, ratio 157.3;
    • deverbals: 2,909,772 forms, ratio 41.15;
    • nouns/adjectives: 1,781,316 forms, ratio 45.55;
    • overall: 131,087 stems give 7,774,938 forms, ratio 59.31.
  • The inventory of extension formatives in actual MSA use is 64 combined proclitics, 8 prefixes, 67 combined suffixes and 13 enclitics.
  • The comparison point is the Xerox Spanish Lexical Transducer in 1996, with about 46,000 base forms and 3.4M inflected forms, giving roughly 74:1.
  • Lemma-level ratios are about one broken plural per four nouns and about 3.6 deverbals per verb. Nouns of time and place should move out of the "deverbal" category.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Use the ratio of generated forms to lemmas, broken down by category, as a sanity check: a lexicon that over- or under-generates shows it as an abnormal ratio, independent of lexicon size.
  • I2. Treat the lemma source program and the generated form lexicon as distinct artifacts, and validate each separately.
  • I3. Express word-internal morphotactics with three relation types (entails, excludes, admits), where "admits" is kept mainly for recognition under ambiguity and reduces to the other two in generation.
  • I4. Filter combinatorial generation stem by stem with lexical specifiers instead of multiplying all affixes by all stems, which avoids inflated pseudo-forms.
  • I5. Record words used both as deverbal and as full noun as two entries with their own specifiers, matching their different syntactic behaviour.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tokens): Track forms-per-lemma per POS in crate en's morphology and flag drift in these ratios as a regression signal after lexicon edits.
  • I2 (tokens): Keep the English lemma and specifier source as the editable truth, regenerate form tables from it, and test the two layers apart.
  • I3 (back): Use strict entail/exclude rules when generating surface forms, and reserve "admits" for the analysis side where several readings must survive.
  • I4 (tokens): Attach per-lemma specifiers (e.g., irregular plural, no comparative) so the inflector only emits licensed forms.
  • I5 (world): Keep participle-like and agentive-noun readings as separate lexical entries so frame and entity building can choose the right one.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Université Lumière Lyon 2Lyon · France3 works · 46 citations

Also on the byline: École nationale supérieure des sciences de l'information et des bibliothèques.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 2,908 works

Cite

Cite as Ramzi Abbès, Joseph Dichy and Mohamed Hassoun. 2004. The Architecture of a Standard Arabic Lexical Database. Some Figures, Ratios and Categories from the DIINAR.1 Source Program. Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{abbes2004architecture,
  title = {{The Architecture of a Standard Arabic Lexical Database. Some Figures, Ratios and Categories from the DIINAR.1 Source Program}},
  author = {Ramzi Abbès, Joseph Dichy and Mohamed Hassoun},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages},
  year = {2004},
  doi = {10.3115/1621804.1621810},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1621804.1621810}
}

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