Identifying Syntactic Ambiguities in Single-Parse Arabic Sentence

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe a technique for identifying the sources of several types of syntactic ambiguity in Arabic Sentences with a single parse only. Normally, any sentence with two or more structural representations is said to be syntactically ambiguous. However, Arabic sentences with only one structural representation may be ambiguous. Our technique for identifying Syntactic Ambiguity in Single-Parse Arabic Sentences (SASPAS) analyzes each sentence and verifies the conditions that govern the existence of certain types of syntactic ambiguities in Arabic sentences. SASPAS is integrated with the syntactic parser, which is based on Definite Clause Grammar (DCG) formalism. The system accepts Arabic sentences in their original script.