---
title: "The Arabic Noun System Generation — Soudi 2024"
description: "Arabic broken plurals change the stem internally (rajul → rijaAl), which makes them hard for morphological generators. 18 references."
authors: ["Abdelhadi Soudi", "Violetta Cavalli-Sforza", "Abderrahim Jamari"]
year: 2024
venue: "arXiv:2405.11014"
source: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.11014"
doi: "10.48550/arxiv.2405.11014"
arxiv: "2405.11014"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (arXiv)"
licence_url: "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/soudi-2024-arabic-noun-system-generation/"
---
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# The Arabic Noun System Generation

**Authors:** [Abdelhadi Soudi](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/abdelhadi-soudi/), Violetta Cavalli-Sforza and Abderrahim Jamari · **Year:** 2024 · **Venue:** arXiv:2405.11014 · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (arXiv)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.11014) · [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.11014) · [DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2405.11014](https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2405.11014) · [arXiv 2405.11014](https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.11014) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2992915040)

**Citations:** 3 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
Arabic broken plurals change the stem internally (rajul → rijaAl), which makes them hard for morphological generators. A single singular pattern can correspond to two to five plural patterns, and nothing reliably predicts which one a given noun takes. The authors review the traditional grammarians' pattern lists, which rely on phonological and semantic conditions. They then use frequency tables from Levy (1971, built on Wehr's dictionary) and Murtonen (1964, built on Lane's dictionary) to show that the shape of the singular narrows the set of candidate plurals but never settles the choice. Deriving plurals from the singular or the root would therefore require brittle truncation and deletion rules. Their alternative, framed in Lexeme-based Morphology, stores a small inventory of number-labelled stems in each lexeme (singular/dual vs. plural), so inflection only has to attach affixes. Sound plurals are handled by marking each entry with its plural class (uwna or aAt). The analysis is implemented in MORPHE, where equivalence declarations let syncretic paradigm cells share a single rule. The result is a simpler generator for Arabic nouns that states more general rules.

## Key points
- Arabic nouns distinguish singular, dual and plural. Plurals split into sound and broken, and broken plurals further into paucity (4 forms, for three to ten items) and multiplicity (at least 23 forms, for more than ten).
- The statistics are read as paired percentages. For example, CaCC × CuCuwC = 73/49 means 73% of singulars behind the plural CuCuwC have the shape CaCC, and 49% of CaCC singulars take CuCuwC.
- A lexeme such as RAJUL has a syntactic level ("noun") and a phonological stem inventory: /rajul/ for singular and dual, /rijaAl/ for plural.
- In MORPHE, a `bpstem` feature supplies the broken plural stem, and an `sp` feature (values uwna/aAt) selects the sound-plural suffix class. If `sp` is absent, the system falls back to a default rule that is shared with the singular.
- Accusative and genitive look the same in sound plurals but differ in broken plurals. Because the enhanced MORPHE can only equivalence leaf and pre-leaf nodes, the broken-plural default rules had to sit at the bottom of the tree.

## Interesting ideas
- When corpus statistics show a form cannot be predicted, list it per lexeme instead of writing ever more complex derivation rules; the frequency tables serve as the evidence for drawing that line.
- Give each lexeme a set of stems tagged with the features they serve, and let inflection rules only add affixes to the right stem.
- If a lexical feature is missing, fall back to a default rule borrowed from another cell of the paradigm, which keeps the lexicon sparse.
- Declare syncretism explicitly by making identical paradigm cells point to one shared rule instead of copying it.
- Read a singular↔plural co-occurrence table in both directions (how often each source pattern leads to a target, and how often the target comes from each source) to measure how predictable a mapping is.

## For Mova

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

- **I1** (tokens): Irregular English plurals and past forms (mice, went) could be stored as labelled stems in the lexicon, with the frequency data documenting why each one is listed rather than derived.
- **I2** (back): The generator could pick a stem by its feature tag and then apply plain suffix rules, so every surface form can be traced to "stem X + rule Y".
- **I3** (tokens): The morphology module could mark only the exceptional lemmas and let everything else fall through to regular rules, logging which path produced each form.
- **I4** (back): Shared cells (for example, identical past and participle forms) could be declared once, which avoids drift between duplicated rules and makes ambiguity visible to the analyzer.
- **I5** (learn): The same two-way percentages could be used to check whether a self-induced repair rule really generalizes or just memorizes a few lemmas.

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

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/)

Topics: [🧩 Morphology](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/morphology/) · [🐪 Semitic languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/semitic-languages/)

## Cite

Cite as: Abdelhadi Soudi, Violetta Cavalli-Sforza and Abderrahim Jamari. 2024. The Arabic Noun System Generation. arXiv:2405.11014.

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

```bibtex
@misc{soudi2024arabic,
  title = {{The Arabic Noun System Generation}},
  author = {Abdelhadi Soudi, Violetta Cavalli-Sforza and Abderrahim Jamari},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2405.11014},
  eprint = {2405.11014},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2405.11014}
}
```

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## References

18 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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8. G.Kiraz. 1994. Multi-tape Two-level Morphology: A Case study in Semitic Non-Linear Morphology. In Proceedings of COLING-94, Vol. 1, pages 180-186. [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/kiraz-1994-multi-tape-two-level-morphology/)
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