Beyond the Determiner “Al-”: Expanding the Determiner Class in Arabic, and Elimination of Lexical Ambiguities by Grammars

Arabic nouns can be marked for definiteness or indefiniteness. The definite article is the prefix “Al-,” which confines the determiner class to a single element “Al-.” This topic is generally discussed under noun inflections, such as Gender, Number, Defini...

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Main Authors: Albatool Abalkheel, Alexis Amid Neme
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2025-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
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Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10973057/
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author Albatool Abalkheel
Alexis Amid Neme
author_facet Albatool Abalkheel
Alexis Amid Neme
author_sort Albatool Abalkheel
collection DOAJ
description Arabic nouns can be marked for definiteness or indefiniteness. The definite article is the prefix “Al-,” which confines the determiner class to a single element “Al-.” This topic is generally discussed under noun inflections, such as Gender, Number, Definiteness, and Case (GNDC), in grammar textbooks. The primary aim of this paper is to expand the Arabic determiner class (DET) by incorporating additional lexical items and providing a detailed description of their syntactic context within noun phrases (NPs). In traditional grammar, these lexical items are typically classified as noun adjectives and, at best, are referred to as noun specifiers since they modify the head noun. However, these “nouns” exhibit limited inflection compared to regular adjectives and occupy a specific position within the NP sequence. Additionally, the modified head nouns are constrained in their inflectional attributes, Number, and Definiteness. Our approach is qualitative and guided by morpho-syntactic considerations. We conduct an in-depth analysis of the grammatical features of ten lexical items, focusing particularly on the dependencies between the determiner and the following noun. This analysis also addresses some semantic properties. By focusing on context-sensitive grammatical rules, the study shows how these methods can enhance precision in parsing and reduce ambiguity in NLP tasks, highlighting the potential for developing more refined grammar for Arabic. This work is a prototype for comprehensive studies in linguistics and NLP.
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spelling doaj-art-e11ea47cadde490b8f9490ef88316dd72025-08-20T03:52:39ZengIEEEIEEE Access2169-35362025-01-0113745317455410.1109/ACCESS.2025.356341410973057Beyond the Determiner “Al-”: Expanding the Determiner Class in Arabic, and Elimination of Lexical Ambiguities by GrammarsAlbatool Abalkheel0https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1802-4361Alexis Amid Neme1Department of English Language and Literature, College of Languages and Humanities, Qassim University, Buraydah, Saudi ArabiaLIGM, Université Gustave Eiffel, Champs-sur-Marne, FranceArabic nouns can be marked for definiteness or indefiniteness. The definite article is the prefix “Al-,” which confines the determiner class to a single element “Al-.” This topic is generally discussed under noun inflections, such as Gender, Number, Definiteness, and Case (GNDC), in grammar textbooks. The primary aim of this paper is to expand the Arabic determiner class (DET) by incorporating additional lexical items and providing a detailed description of their syntactic context within noun phrases (NPs). In traditional grammar, these lexical items are typically classified as noun adjectives and, at best, are referred to as noun specifiers since they modify the head noun. However, these “nouns” exhibit limited inflection compared to regular adjectives and occupy a specific position within the NP sequence. Additionally, the modified head nouns are constrained in their inflectional attributes, Number, and Definiteness. Our approach is qualitative and guided by morpho-syntactic considerations. We conduct an in-depth analysis of the grammatical features of ten lexical items, focusing particularly on the dependencies between the determiner and the following noun. This analysis also addresses some semantic properties. By focusing on context-sensitive grammatical rules, the study shows how these methods can enhance precision in parsing and reduce ambiguity in NLP tasks, highlighting the potential for developing more refined grammar for Arabic. This work is a prototype for comprehensive studies in linguistics and NLP.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10973057/Arabiccorpus linguisticsexplainable AIlarge language modelmethodologynatural language processing
spellingShingle Albatool Abalkheel
Alexis Amid Neme
Beyond the Determiner “Al-”: Expanding the Determiner Class in Arabic, and Elimination of Lexical Ambiguities by Grammars
IEEE Access
Arabic
corpus linguistics
explainable AI
large language model
methodology
natural language processing
title Beyond the Determiner “Al-”: Expanding the Determiner Class in Arabic, and Elimination of Lexical Ambiguities by Grammars
title_full Beyond the Determiner “Al-”: Expanding the Determiner Class in Arabic, and Elimination of Lexical Ambiguities by Grammars
title_fullStr Beyond the Determiner “Al-”: Expanding the Determiner Class in Arabic, and Elimination of Lexical Ambiguities by Grammars
title_full_unstemmed Beyond the Determiner “Al-”: Expanding the Determiner Class in Arabic, and Elimination of Lexical Ambiguities by Grammars
title_short Beyond the Determiner “Al-”: Expanding the Determiner Class in Arabic, and Elimination of Lexical Ambiguities by Grammars
title_sort beyond the determiner x201c al x201d expanding the determiner class in arabic and elimination of lexical ambiguities by grammars
topic Arabic
corpus linguistics
explainable AI
large language model
methodology
natural language processing
url https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10973057/
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