Arabic Broken Plural Generation Using the Extracted Linguistic Conditions Based on Root and Pattern Approach in the NooJ Platform

This paper presents a linguistic study of number’s morphological feature that affects nouns, verbs, adjectives and gerunds (verbal nouns) by giving a special attention to the Arabic Broken Plurals (BPs). The difficulty lies on specifying the candidate Broken plural Pattern/Patterns (BPP/BPPs) to find the BP Form/Forms (BPF/BPFs) of a given Singular Form (SF). The Arabic BP is not automatically generated as other grammatical categories, e.g. verbs. The BP generation depends on SF’s morphological, phonological and semantic features. We have extracted from a deep linguistic study 108 sets of morphological, phonological and semantic conditions, which serve to restrict the generation process of the BPF from its SF. The extracted conditions may give one or more BPP for a given SF. We take into account the exceptions that permeate the extracted conditions. We have implemented inflectional and derivational grammars that generate the BPF using the Root-Pattern approach. This requires building a dictionary that considers not only the root and pattern of the SF as its entries, but also the SF’s morphological, phonological and semantic features using NooJ platform.