Automatic Part-of-Speech Tagging of Arabic-English Dictionary Senses through WordNet

This paper proposed an algorithm for part-of-speech (POS) tagging senses of a bilingual dictionary. The algorithm is applied on the Al-Mawrid Arabic-English dictionary.

The tagging task is accomplished by transferring the POS tags of the English translation equivalences (TEs) to the dictionary senses after dis-ambiguities process. The English POS tags of senses are acquired from the Princeton WordNet.

POS tagging of bilingual dictionary senses is prerequisite to link a bilingual dictionary to WordNet and/or standardizing that dictionary into WordNet-LMF format where the synset (set of synonyms), not word, is the basic brick. The registered accuracy is high though the cost is little.

Building NLP/HLT tools needs linguistic experts, large investments, and long time. For statistical approach, we need large annotated corpora and for rule-based approach, we need large lexicon that contains rich linguistic and world knowledge.

That motivates the appearance of what are called resource-light approaches to develop natural language processing (NLP) tools for poor-resource languages.