--- title: "Clitics in Arabic Language: A Statistical Study — Alotaiby 2010" description: "Arabic clitics (prefixes such as the article and the conjunction, and suffixes such as the pronouns) are written… 11 references, cited by 1 paper here." authors: ["Fahad Alotaiby", "Salah Foda", "Ibrahim Alkharashi"] year: 2010 venue: "Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation" source: "https://aclanthology.org/Y10-1068/" licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/alotaiby-2010-clitics-arabic-language-statistical-study/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/alotaiby-2010-clitics-arabic-language-statistical-study/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2010](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2010/page/2/) / Clitics in Arabic Language: A Statistical Study # Clitics in Arabic Language: A Statistical Study **Authors:** Fahad Alotaiby; Salah Foda; Ibrahim Alkharashi · **Year:** 2010 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation **Link:** [aclanthology.org/Y10-1068](https://aclanthology.org/Y10-1068/) · library `aclbulk-2010-alotaiby-clitics-arabic-language-statistical-study` · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only [**13** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2144863929) OpenAlex, 2026-10-14 · [**1** citations in our library](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/alotaiby-2010-clitics-arabic-language-statistical-study/cited-by/) of the 140,884 papers whose bibliographies we read · [Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/Y10-1/) · [licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) - [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/Y10-1068/) - [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/Y10-1068.pdf) - [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2144863929) **Authors (3)** 1. Fahad Alotaiby [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/3234408) 2. [Salah Foda](https://openalex.org/A5014277403) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/3385162) · h 9 · 285 citations · 34 works 3. Ibrahim Alkharashi [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2817852) Citations and author metrics: OpenAlex, 2026-10-14; authors with the same name are not always told apart. ## What it is about Arabic clitics (prefixes such as the article and the conjunction, and suffixes such as the pronouns) are written without a separator, so one white-space word can contain several tokens. The authors tokenize a 600-million-word Arabic newswire corpus with AMIRA 2.0 in its fast mode (about 300 hours on a quad-processor PC) and count unique types before and after the split. The unique main tokens go from 2,207,637 to 1,665,899 sub-tokens, a reduction of 24.54%, and the clitic frequencies are compared with the manually tokenized Arabic Treebank part 3. The tool produces false clitics (a letter A taken as a prefix, and others), and the paper lists them in a table with about 100,000 cases in total. The authors recommend a lexicon of sub-tokens for speech recognition, because it is smaller and covers more of the language. The paper reports the lexicon size as a function of corpus size, from 10 to 600 million tokens. ## Ideas - I1. Measure the type reduction by splitting, and the growth curve by corpus size, for Hebrew and Aramaic text in the same way. The count is deterministic and needs only open text, and it says how big a segmenter lexicon must be before it stops growing. - I3. Count clitic frequencies on the MACULA trees and compare them with the automatic split on the same words. The gap, not the raw frequencies, tells where the segmenter tables are missing entries. ## For Mova - I2. Keep the paper's list of false clitics as a negative control for the segmenter: a split into a prefix that is not a clitic must be rejected. Concretely, a split is allowed only when the remainder is a known lexeme (checked in `lex` and `pre` of `tools/hbo`). I1 is a measurement for `tools/hbo` (the segmenter lexicon, `lex`/`pre` tables) and for [languages/hbo/10-lexicon.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/10-lexicon/). I2 is a negative test for the same tables. I3 belongs to `tools/macula` and to the clitic inventory in [languages/hbo/05-pronouns-particles.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/05-pronouns-particles/). The same method applies to `languages/arc/` once there is a corpus. ## Institutions [🎓**King Saud University** Riyadh · Saudi Arabia 13 works · 290 citations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/king-saud-university/) Topics[Semitic languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/semitic-languages/) ## Cite Cite as Fahad Alotaiby, Salah Foda and Ibrahim Alkharashi. 2010. Clitics in Arabic Language: A Statistical Study. Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation. The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{alotaiby2010clitics, title = {{Clitics in Arabic Language: A Statistical Study}}, author = {Fahad Alotaiby, Salah Foda and Ibrahim Alkharashi}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation}, year = {2010}, url = {https://aclanthology.org/Y10-1068/} } ``` - [← previous Extending BART to Provide a Coreference Resolution System for German](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/broscheit-2010-extending-bart-provide-coreference-resolution/) - [next → The Same-Head Heuristic for Coreference](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/elsner-2010-same-head-heuristic-coreference/) - [↑ back to papers of 2010](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2010/page/2/) ## References 11 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Alotaiby, F., I. Alkharashi and S. Foda. 2009. Processing large Arabic text corpora: Preliminary analysis and results. Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Arabic Language Resources and Tools, Cairo, Egypt, pp. 78-82. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Alotaiby%2C+F%2E%2C+I%2E+Alkharashi+and+S%2E+Foda%2E+2009%2E+Processing+large+Arabic+text+corpora%3A+Preliminary+analysis+and+results%2E+Proceedings+of+the+Second+International+Conference+on+Arabic+Language+Resources+a) 2. Attia, M. 2007. Arabic tokenization system. Proceedings of the 2007 Workshop on Computational Approaches To Semitic Languages: Common Issues and Resources, Prague, Czech Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 65-72. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Attia%2C+M%2E+2007%2E+Arabic+tokenization+system%2E+Proceedings+of+the+2007+Workshop+on+Computational+Approaches+To+Semitic+Languages%3A+Common+Issues+and+Resources%2C+Prague%2C+Czech+Republic%2E+Association+for+Comp) 3. Buckwalter, T. 2004a. Issues in Arabic Orthography and Morphology Analysis. Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages, Geneva, Switzerland. [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/buckwalter-2004-issues-arabic-orthography-morphology-analysis/) 4. Buckwalter, T. 2004b. Buckwalter Arabic Morphological Analyzer Version 2.0, Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalogue number LDC2004L02, ISBN 1-58563-324-0, Philadelphia. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Buckwalter%2C+T%2E+2004b%2E+Buckwalter+Arabic+Morphological+Analyzer+Version+2%2E0%2C+Linguistic+Data+Consortium+%28LDC%29+catalogue+number+LDC2004L02%2C+ISBN+1%2D58563%2D324%2D0%2C+Philadelphia%2E) 5. Diab, M. 2009. Second generation AMIRA tools for Arabic processing: Fast and robust tokenization, POS tagging, and phrase chunking. Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Arabic Language Resources and Tools, Cairo, Egypt, pp. 285-288. 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[find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Graff%2C+D%2E+2007%2E+Arabic+Gigaword+Third+Edition%2E+Linguistic+Data+Consortium%2E+Philadelphia%2C+USA%2E) 8. Graff, D., J. Kong, K. Chen and K. Maeda. 2007. English Gigaword Third Edition. Linguistic Data Consortium. Philadelphia, USA. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Graff%2C+D%2E%2C+J%2E+Kong%2C+K%2E+Chen+and+K%2E+Maeda%2E+2007%2E+English+Gigaword+Third+Edition%2E+Linguistic+Data+Consortium%2E+Philadelphia%2C+USA%2E) 9. Habash, N., O. Rambow and R. Roth. 2009. MADA+TOKAN: A toolkit for Arabic tokenization, diacritization, morphological disambiguation, POS tagging, stemming and lemmatization. Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Arabic Language Resources and Tools, Cairo, Egypt, pp. 102-109. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Habash%2C+N%2E%2C+O%2E+Rambow+and+R%2E+Roth%2E+2009%2E+MADA%2BTOKAN%3A+A+toolkit+for+Arabic+tokenization%2C+diacritization%2C+morphological+disambiguation%2C+POS+tagging%2C+stemming+and+lemmatization%2E+Proceedings+of+the+Second) 10. Maamouri, M., A. Bies, S. Kulick, F. Gaddeche, and W. Mekki. 2007. Arabic Treebank: Part 3(a) v. 2.6. Linguistic Data Consortium. Philadelphia, USA, Catalog ID: LDC2007E65. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Maamouri%2C+M%2E%2C+A%2E+Bies%2C+S%2E+Kulick%2C+F%2E+Gaddeche%2C+and+W%2E+Mekki%2E+2007%2E+Arabic+Treebank%3A+Part+3%28a%29+v%2E+2%2E6%2E+Linguistic+Data+Consortium%2E+Philadelphia%2C+USA%2C+Catalog+ID%3A+LDC2007E65%2E) 11. Manning, C., and H. Schütze. 1999. Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.. 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