A Unification Based Approach to the Morphological Analysis and Generation of Arabic

In this paper, we present a powerful Arabic morphological analyzer and generator. The approach employs finite state machines enriched with unification capability. The presented system is used as a component in both statistical and rule based machine translation systems. We give detailed illustrations on how we handle nominal and verbal morphology in Arabic. Issues regarding derivational morphology and morphological generation are also addressed. Stimulating problems particular to Arabic and our solutions to these problems are explored meanwhile. An evaluation of the system is presented at the end.