International Journal of Linguistics and Computational Applications (IJLCA) ISSN 2394-6385 (Print) Volume 5, Issue 3, July - September 2018 ISSN 2394-6393 (Online) 45 DOI: 10.30726/ijlca/v5.i3.2018.52012 Towards Developing a Morphological Analyser for Arabic Noun Forms Mohammad Mahyoob #1, Jeehaan Algaraady* 2 1 Asisstant Professor, Department of Languages and Translation, College of Science & Arts, Alula, Taibah University, Almadinah, Saudi Arabia. eflu2010@gmail.com 2 Asisstant Professor, Department of English, Taiz University, Taiz, Yemen Abstract — This paper studies the Morphological analysis and processing of noun forms in Arabic language. It focuses on the inflected noun forms and discusses the singular, dual and plural formation as well as case representation. The deterministic finite state morphological parser for the Arabic forms can deal with Morphological and orthographic features of Arabic and the morphological processes which are involved in Arabic verb and noun formation and declension. The Morphological analyser adds all the necessary information (prefix, suffix, stem, etc.) to each morpheme of the words; so the values will be added to each morpheme. Using Finite State tool to build the computational lexicon that are usually structured with a list of the stems and affixes of the language together with a representation that tells us how they can be combined together and how the network of all forms can be represented. Keywords — Computational Morphology; Morphological Analysis; Noun Forms, Finite State, Arabic Language. 1. Introduction Arabic belongs to the Semitic family of languages. The Semitic morphology is different from that of many other languages. In English and other Indo-European languages, a root may be a free morph that cannot be further decomposed into meaningful parts [1]. However an Arabic stem is produced from three morphemes: a template, a root and vocalic melody in addition to the agreement affixes. Other languages belonging to this group are: Amharic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Tigrinya and Maltese [2]. The Arabic language grammarians organized words into three main divisions. These divisions also have sub-divisions that contain every word in Arabic language. Seen in this perspective a noun form in Arabic and its inflections in addition to the agreement affixes. As pointed in the above lines the Semitic morphology is different in many ways. A unique characteristic of this morphology is the non-concatenative merging of roots and patterns to form words or word stems. The formation of Semitic words can be viewed as a simple mechanism consisting of two lists: a relatively short list of templates, no more than a few hundred, for forming nouns, verbs, etc. in all their inflected forms; and a much longer list of several thousand roots [3]. In view of the facts given above the Arabic morphological analysis needs to add all the necessary information (prefix, infix, suffix, etc.) to each root or stem of the words. Further, we need technical applications that analyse Arabic words and deal with internal structure of a given word. 2. Noun Inflections Nouns in Arabic language have, three numbers; singular, dual and plural. The distinction between nouns is based on ʕadad ‘number’. All nouns in Arabic language are either مفردmufrad ‘singular’, مثه ىmuthannaa ‘dual’ or جمع gamʕ 'plural’. In Standard Arabic, the use of the dual is referred to exactly two objects. The plural is referred to more than two and it has two types, sound plural and broken plural. The sound plural is formed by adding suffixes to the end of the singular form, and can be part of the declension. The broken plural in Arabic language is formed in different ways. It belongs to a different declension, and is declined as a singular noun. The nouns that have the ‘masculine’ sound plural – uun/-eeyn are nouns referring to male human beings, e.g .muzaraa ‘farmer’, muhandis ‘engineer’. On the other hand, the ‘feminine’ sound plural -aat occurs not only on nouns referring to female human beings, but also on many nouns referring to objects, whether masculine or feminine , e.g. masculine: ʔimtihaan ‘exam’, feminine: sayyaarah ‘car’. All the names of objects take feminine singular agreement in the plural, according to their inherent gender and the form of the plural. Some nouns have two or more plural forms, usually to distinguish between different meanings. In English, a noun may be singular or plural. Singular refers to one person, thing, idea, etc. Plural refers