Arabic Tweets Treebanking and Parsing: A Bootstrapping Approach

In this paper, we propose using a ”bootstrapping” method for constructing a dependency treebank of Arabic tweets. This method uses a rule-based parser to create a small treebank of one thousand Arabic tweets and a data-driven parser to create a larger treebank by using the small treebank as a seed training set. We are able to create a dependency treebank from unlabelled tweets without any manual intervention. Experiments results show that this method can improve the speed of training the parser and the accuracy of the resulting parsers.