---
title: "Générer une grammaire d'arbres adjoints pour l'arabe à partir"
description: "This RECITAL 2017 paper describes ArabTAG V2.0, a Tree Adjoining Grammar for Arabic. 19 references."
authors: ["Ben Khelil, Cherifa"]
year: 2017
venue: "Actes des 24ème Conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles. 19es REncontres jeunes Chercheurs en Informatique pour le TAL (RECITAL 2017)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2017.jeptalnrecital-recital.6/"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/khelil-2017-generer-une-grammaire-d-arbres/"
---
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# Générer une grammaire d'arbres adjoints pour l'arabe à partir d'une méta-grammaire (Generate a tree adjoining grammar for Arabic from a meta-grammar)

**Authors:** Ben Khelil, Cherifa · **Year:** 2017 · **Venue:** [Actes des 24ème Conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles. 19es REncontres jeunes Chercheurs en Informatique pour le TAL (RECITAL 2017)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/jeptalnrecital/) ([JEP-TALN-RECITAL (the French-speaking conferences on speech and natural language processing) 2017](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/jeptalnrecital/2017/)) · **Publisher:** [ATALA](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/atala/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2017.jeptalnrecital-recital.6/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2017.jeptalnrecital-recital.6.pdf)

## Summary
Arabic lacks openly available syntactic resources. Its free tools mostly cover morphology, existing formal grammars (transformational, LFG, HPSG) have narrow coverage, and treebanks are not freely accessible. This RECITAL 2017 paper describes ArabTAG V2.0, a Tree Adjoining Grammar for Arabic. It is no longer a hand-written list of trees. Instead, it is produced semi-automatically from a compact meta-grammar written in XMG (eXtensible MetaGrammar). The author starts from ArabTAG V1.0, which has 380 unconnected elementary trees, and names its weaknesses: thin coverage, poor handling of agglutinated forms, no semantic information, and no hierarchical organisation. V2.0 encodes shared tree fragments once and combines them through XMG inheritance. The resulting grammar covers active and passive verbal sentences, nominal sentences, noun phrases and prepositional phrases, with semi-free word order, extra complements and clitic forms. Nodes carry unification features. Evaluation is the open problem, because suitable resources are missing. Testing so far uses only a small hand-built corpus and a lexicon tailored to it. The work matters because it shows a maintainable, extensible route to a broad-coverage symbolic grammar for a low-resource language.

## Key points
- ArabTAG V1.0 (Ben Fraj, 2011) has 380 elementary trees in four families: verbal sentences, nominal sentences, noun phrases and prepositional phrases. The trees are not linked to each other.
- ArabTAG V2.0 is rewritten in XMG (Crabbé et al., 2013). It is organised hierarchically through inheritance, and factorised descriptions handle Arabic's semi-free word order.
- V2.0 covers verbal sentences (active and passive), nominal sentences, NPs and PPs, extra complements and agglutinated forms. Its unification features carry morphological, syntactic and syntactico-semantic information.
- TAG's adjunction operation models embedding naturally. The paper's example is a relative clause inserted into a main sentence. TAG is mildly context-sensitive and parsable in O(n⁶).
- The grammar has only been checked on a small test corpus with a corpus-specific lexicon. The planned future work is:
  - enlarging the corpus with harder sentences and ungrammatical ones;
  - extending the lexicon from an Arabic dictionary;
  - using XMG2 to add morphology (topological fields) and semantics (frames).

## Interesting ideas
- Describe the grammar once as reusable fragments and let a compiler expand them into all concrete trees, instead of maintaining hundreds of trees by hand; this makes the grammar easier to extend and keeps it consistent.
- Handle free or semi-free word order by factorising it, with one abstract description and variants generated by combining it, rather than writing a separate structure for each order.
- Before building the new version, audit the old resource for specific gaps, such as missing adjuncts, mishandled clitics, no semantics and no hierarchy, and let that list drive the redesign.
- Plan to add ungrammatical sentences to the test corpus, so the grammar is checked for wrongly accepting bad input and not only for covering good input.
- Attach feature structures, including syntactico-semantic ones, to grammar nodes, so composition is constrained by agreement and meaning and not by category labels alone.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (tree): UD dialect conversion rules could be written as small composable fragments that are compiled into full rule sets, so one change spreads to every construction that inherits it.
- **I2** (frames): frame patterns for a verb class could be stated once, independent of order, with surface variants such as passive, fronting or inversion derived automatically before matching against UD trees.
- **I3** (learn): a regular structured gap audit of the parser and frame inventory could set the priorities for writing repair rules or collecting silver data.
- **I4** (learn): negative-control sentences could test that frame extraction and readers reject or flag malformed input instead of producing confident answers.
- **I5** (back): generation from the meaning graph could use the same feature checks to block outputs with wrong agreement before any text is produced.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

📚 Shelves (2): [🖥️ Computer Science](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/) · 18,614 works · [🤖 Artificial Intelligence](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/artificial-intelligence/) · 17,965 works

🧭 Topics (3): [Semitic languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/semitic-languages/) · 3,066 works · [🧩 Morphology](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/morphology/) · 420 works · [📐 Syntax & grammar formalisms](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/syntax-grammar/) · 221 works

## Cite

Cite as: Ben Khelil, Cherifa. 2017. Générer une grammaire d'arbres adjoints pour l'arabe à partir d'une méta-grammaire (Generate a tree adjoining grammar for Arabic from a meta-grammar). Actes des 24ème Conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles. 19es REncontres jeunes Chercheurs en Informatique pour le TAL (RECITAL 2017).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{cherifa2017generer,
  title = {{Générer une grammaire d'arbres adjoints pour l'arabe à partir d'une méta-grammaire (Generate a tree adjoining grammar for Arabic from a meta-grammar)}},
  author = {Ben Khelil, Cherifa},
  booktitle = {Actes des 24ème Conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles. 19es REncontres jeunes Chercheurs en Informatique pour le TAL (RECITAL 2017)},
  year = {2017},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2017.jeptalnrecital-recital.6/}
}
```

- [← previous Fuchs, Robert. 2016. Speech Rhythm in Varieties of English. Evidence from Educated Indian English and British English. Cham: Springer International Publishing. 216 pages.](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/torgersen-2017-fuchs-robert-2016-speech-rhythm/)
- [next → L'analyse et l'annotation à base de FrameNet : contribution à l'étude contrastive des événements de mouvement en arabe et en anglais FrameNet-based analysis and annotation: contribution to the constrastive study of motion events in Arabic and English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lakhfif-2017-l-analyse-et-l-annotation/)
- [↑ back to papers of 2017](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2017/page/6/)

## References

19 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 2 November 2026*