Adapting Standard Open-Source Resources To Tagging A Morphologically Rich Language: A Case Study With Arabic

In this paper we investigate the possibility of creating a PoS tagger for Modern Standard Arabic by integrating open-source tools. In particular a morphological analyser, used in the disambiguation process with a PoS tagger trained on classical Arabic. The investigation shows the scarcity of open-source tools and resources, which complicated the integration process. Among the problems are different input/output formats of each tool, granularity of tag sets and different tokenisation schemes. The final prototype of the PoS tagger was trained on classical Arabic and tested on a sample text of modern standard Arabic. The results are not that impressive, only an accuracy of 73% is achieved. This paper however outlines the difficulties of integrating tools today and proposes ideas for future work in the field and shows that classical Arabic is not sufficient as training data for an Arabic tagger.