Buckwalter-based Lookup Tool as Language Resource for Arabic Language Learners

The morphology of the Arabic language is rich and complex; words are inflected to express variations in tense-aspect, person, number, and gender, while they may also appear with clitics attached to express possession on nouns, objects on verbs and prepositions, and conjunctions. Furthermore, Arabic script allows the omission of short vowel diacritics. For the Arabic language learner trying to understand non-diacritized text, the challenge when reading new vocabulary is first to isolate individual words within text tokens and then to determine the underlying lemma and root forms to look up the word in an Arabic dictionary. Buckwalter (2005)’s morphological analyzer (BMA) provides an exhaustive enumeration of the possible internal structures for individual Arabic strings in XML, spelling out all possible vocalizations (diacritics added back in), parts of speech on each token identified within the string, lemma ids, and English glosses for each tokenized substring. The version of our Buckwalter-based Lookup Tool (BBLT) that we describe in this poster provides an interactive interface for language learners to copy and paste, or type in, single or multiple Arabic strings for analysis by BMA (see Fig. 1)