Arabic-SOS: Segmentation, stemming, and orthography standardization for classical and pre-modern standard Arabic

Abstract

While morphological segmentation has always been a hot topic in Arabic, due to the morphological complexity of the language and the orthography, most effort has focused on Modern Standard Arabic. In this paper, we focus on pre-MSA texts. We use the Gradient Boosting algorithm to train a morphological segmenter with a corpus derived from Al-Manar, a late 19th/early 20th century magazine that focused on the Arabic and Islamic heritage. Since most of the cultural heritage Arabic available suffers from substandard orthography, we have trained a machine learner to standardize the text. Our segmentation accuracy reaches 98.47%, and the orthography standardization an F-macro of 0.98 and an F-micro of 0.99. We also produce stemming as a by-product of segmentation.