Pro-drop in Standard Arabic

Pro-Drop and Impoverishment

It is often assumed that some notion of morphological richness plays a central role in the theory of pro-drop: In languages with sufficiently rich verbal φ-feature (person, number, gender) agreement morphology, pronominal arguments can (and, in some contexts, must) remain without phonological realization; in languages without such a rich verbal agreement morphology, pronominal arguments must be...

Transforming Standard Arabic to Colloquial Arabic

We present a method for generating Colloquial Egyptian Arabic (CEA) from morphologically disambiguated Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). When used in POS tagging, this process improves the accuracy from 73.24% to 86.84% on unseen CEA text, and reduces the percentage of out-ofvocabulary words from 28.98% to 16.66%. The process holds promise for any NLP task targeting the dialectal varieties of Arabi...

Early operators and late topic-drop/pro-drop

This paper compares two reduction principles in child language, Tense/Agreement Omission (Schütze 1997, Wexler 1998) and Root Peripheral Truncation (Rizzi 1994, 2001). The paper argues that the empirical content of these proposals as well as their partial overlap follows from an inherent hierarchy of acquisition steps of the kind predicted in Jakobson (1942). The empirical support for this rein...

When pro pro Pro-drop Languages Don't: on Overt Pronominal Subjects in Greek

Translating Pro-Drop Languages with Reconstruction Models

Pronouns are frequently omitted in pro-drop languages, such as Chinese, generally leading to significant challenges with respect to the production of complete translations. To date, very little attention has been paid to the dropped pronoun (DP) problem within neural machine translation (NMT). In this work, we propose a novel reconstruction-based approach to alleviating DP translation problems ...