â arabic seems to have borrowed the word amen ( אö¸×žöµ×Ÿ ) originally from hebrew and used it as a religious term in islamic discourse the same as jewish. although it has a clear meaning in hebrew, there is no explicit meaning for it in arabic dictionaries and sources. at the same time, some hebrew hypotheses about this word have had an effect on the comprehension of the arab philologists and...

We present a study of aspects of discourse structure — specifically discourse devices used to organize information in a sentence — that significantly impact the quality of machine translation. Our analysis is based on manual evaluations of translations of news from Chinese and Arabic to English. We find that there is a particularly strong mismatch in the notion of what constitutes a sentence in...

In the current study we aim at exploiting discourse structure of Arabic text to automatically finding answers to non-factoid questions ("Why" and "How to"). Our method is based on Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) that many studies have shown to be a very effective approach for many computational linguistics applications such as (text generation, text summarization and machine translation). For...

We present scenarii showing the interactive construction of operators. Some grammars and their progressive refinements through the “feedback” method are given as an example: a kernel of grammars for retrieving quotations, a grammar reflecting a current syntactic operator. We also recall previously developed morphological parsers. These grammars are designed as Finite State Automata, part of the...

This paper describes a rule-based approach to segment Arabic texts into clauses. Our method relies on an extensive analysis of a large set of lexical cues as well as punctuation marks. Our analysis was carried out on two different corpus genres: news articles and elementary school textbooks. We propose a three steps segmentation algorithm: first by using only punctuation marks, then by relying ...