A Computational Morphological Model for Arabic Diminutive Generation

Abstract

This paper presents a computational morphological model which is capable of generating ‎Arabic diminutives. It consists mainly of two parts: a linguistic analysis and implementation. ‎The linguistic analysis follows the Prosodic Morphology theory to account for the templatic ‎formation of Arabic diminutives. In the implementation part, the model employs pushdown ‎automata (PDA) to model diminutive morphology building on the linguistic analysis. The ‎model consists of two components: a lexicon and transformational rules. The lexicon ‎component contains the lexical entries which are classified according to four criteria: their ‎syllabic structure, the number of consonants they have, vowels length in syllables, and the ‎presence of the feminine marker.  The core of the grammar is a set of 11 transformational rules ‎which are capable of generating diminutives from the different classes of stems. The model ‎has been implemented in NooJ tool and has been tested on all classes of stems, biconsonantal, ‎triconsonantal, quadri-consonantal and quinque-consonantal. The paper also shows how the ‎challenging problem of Arabic non-concatenative diminutive formation can be efficiently ‎handled using pushdown automata implemented in NooJ tool