Arabic Computational Morphology: A Trade-off Between Multiple Operations and Multiple Stems

We present a computational approach to Arabic morphology description that draws from Lexeme-Based Morphology (Aronoff, 1994; Beard, 1995), giving priority to stems and granting a subordinate status to inflectional prefixes and suffixes. Although the morphology of Arabic is non-concatenative, we make the process of generating inflected forms concatenative by separating the generation of stems from that of other inflectional affixes. Our approach is implemented in an extension of the MORPHE tool (Leavitt, 1994), which has been enhanced in order to provide a representational formalism that embodies Lexeme-Based Morphology theory and minimizes the number of rules required for the description of Arabic morphology