A Top-Down Chart Parser for Analyzing Arabic Sentences

Parsing of Arabic sentences is a necessary mechanism for many natural language processing applications such as machine translation; question answering, knowledge extraction and information retrieval. In this study, we present a top-down chart parser for parsing simple Arabic sentences, including nominal and verbal sentences within specific domain Arabic grammar. We used the Context Free Grammar (CFGs) to represent the Arabic grammar. We first developed the Arabic grammar rules that give precise description of grammatical sentences. Then, we implemented the parser that assigns grammatical structure to the input sentence. The parser is tested on sentences extracted from real documents. Experimental results showed the effeteness of the proposed top-down chart parser for parsing modern standard Arabic sentences. From a practical perspective, the parser is able to satisfy syntactic constraints and reduce parsing ambiguity.