Inflectional and Morphological Variation of Arabic Multi-word Expressions

CompounDic is an Arabic MWEs dictionary that lists many entries, divided into more than 20 domains. It lists only MWEs in their base form. With regard to syntactic and morphological flexibility, the lexicon covers 2 types of MWEs: Fixed MWEs (no variation allowed) and semi-fixed MWEs (variation in their structural pattern). Arabic presents distinctive features to deal with MWEs processing. A lot of possible derivations are possible (plural or dual forms, multiple irregular plurals). In addition, we need to process agglutination forms. In this paper, we will study the structural variability of semi-fixed multiword expressions in Arabic language in order to recognize the morphological and inflectional variations. We will adopt a recognition approach based on the use of a cascade of local grammars.