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Extracting Arabic Causal Relations Using Linguistic Patterns

Published: 08 March 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Identifying semantic relations is a crucial step in discourse analysis and is useful for many applications in both language and speech technology. Automatic detection of Causal relations therefore has gained popularity in the literature within different frameworks. The aim of this article is the automatic detection and extraction of Causal relations that are explicitly expressed in Arabic texts. To fulfill this goal, a Pattern Recognizer model was developed to signal the presence of cause--effect information within sentences from nonspecific domain texts. This model incorporates approximately 700 linguistic patterns so that parts of the sentence representing the cause and those representing the effect can be distinguished. The patterns were constructed based on different sets of syntactic features by analyzing a large untagged Arabic corpus. In addition, the model was boosted with three independent algorithms to deal with certain types of grammatical particles that indicate causation. With this approach, the proposed model achieved an overall recall of 81% and a precision of 78%. Evaluation results revealed that the justification particles play a key role in detecting Causal relations. To the best of our knowledge, no previous studies have been dedicated to dealing with this type of relation in the Arabic language.

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    cover image ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing
    ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing  Volume 15, Issue 3
    March 2016
    220 pages
    ISSN:2375-4699
    EISSN:2375-4702
    DOI:10.1145/2876004
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 08 March 2016
    Accepted: 01 January 2015
    Received: 01 June 2014
    Published in TALLIP Volume 15, Issue 3

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    Author Tags

    1. Arabic discourse relations
    2. Patterns matching
    3. causal relations
    4. information extraction

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