ARL-TN-0735 ● FEB 2016

US Army Research Laboratory

ARL Arabic Dependency Treebank

by Stephen C Tratz

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ARL-TN-0735 ● FEB 2016

US Army Research Laboratory

ARL Arabic Dependency Treebank

by Stephen C Tratz

Computational and Information Sciences Directorate, ARL

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ARL Arabic Dependency Treebank

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13. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES

14. ABSTRACT

This technical note describes the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) Arabic Dependency Treebank (AADT) for the 

purpose of documenting its release. The AADT was derived from existing Arabic treebanks distributed by the Linguistic Data 

Consortium using constituent-to-dependency conversion software written at ARL. Earlier versions of the AADT, as well as 

parsers trained from it, have been used in several published ARL research efforts, and, by releasing the data, we hope to 

facilitate additional Arabic language processing research by the greater community.

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Arabic, treebank, parsing

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Contents

1. Overview 1

2. File Format 1

3. Part-of-Speech (POS) Tag Scheme 3

4. Dependency Label Scheme 3

5. References 4

Appendix A. Part-of-Speech Tag List 5

Appendix B. Dependency Labels List 11

Distribution List 14
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1. Overview

This technical note provides a brief description of the US Army Research 

Laboratory (ARL) Arabic Dependency Treebank (AADT) version 1.0 for the 

purpose of documenting its release. AADT was automatically derived from 4

existing Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) resources—the latest versions of the 

Arabic Treebank (ATB) parts 1, 2, and 3, as well as the Arabic Treebank Broadcast

News dataset (Maamouri, et al.; LDC2010T13, LDC2011T09, LDC2010T08, 

LDC2012T07). The original ATB contains over 2,000 news stories produced by a 

handful of Arabic news services. Each story was annotated by the LDC, with every 

token receiving its appropriate part-of-speech tag and morphological segmentation,

and every sentence being annotated with its constituent parse. For AADT, we 

created dependency parses for latest version of the conversion process briefly 

described in Section 4.5 of the paper “A Cross-Task Flexible Transition Model for 

Arabic Tokenization, Affix Detection, Affix Labeling, POS Tagging, and 

Dependency Parsing” (Tratz, 2013). An earlier version of this dependency treebank 

was also used in the paper “Resumptive Pronoun Detection for Modern Standard 

Arabic to English MT” (Tratz, 2014). The LDC is one of the foremost sources of 

annotated data used in computational linguistics, and, by releasing this dependency 

treebank back to them for redistribution, we hope to facilitate Arabic natural 

language processing research by the greater community.

The remainder of this technical note defines the dependency tree file format 

(Section 2), and presents the part-of-speech tag (Section 3) and dependency label

(Section 4) schemes used throughout the AADT.

2. File Format

The files are in an 11-column tab-separated format with one or more blank lines 

between sentences. All files are UTF-8 encoded. An example is presented below.
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

0/0 core -1/0 ROOT mDy >amoDaY_1 امضى AmDY VB_PV spend/accomplish/... -

1/0 core 0/0 subj rkb rAkib_1 ركاب rkAb NOUN riders/passengers -

2/0 pref - - - - ال Al DET the -

2/1 core 1/0 idafa Tyr TA}irap_1 طائر TA}r NOUN aircraft/airplane -

2/2 suff - - - - ة p NSUFF_FEM_SG [fem.sg.] -

3/0 pref - - - - ال Al DET the -

3/1 core 2/1 amod sEd saEuwdiy~_1 سعودي sEwdy ADJ Saudi -

4/0 core 0/0 obj lyl layolap_1 لیل lyl NOUN night/evening/soire -

4/1 suff - - - - ت t NSUFF_FEM_SG [fem.sg.] -

4/2 core 4/0 idafa - - ھم hm PRON_AG_3_MASC_PL their -

5/0 pref - - - - ال Al DET the -

5/1 core 4/0 amod mDy mADiy_1 ماضي mADy ADJ past/bygone -

5/2 suff - - - - ة p NSUFF_FEM_SG [fem.sg.] -

6/0 core 0/0 prep fy fiy_1 في fy PREP in -

7/0 core 6/0 pcomp fndq funoduq_1 فندق fndq NOUN hotel -

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

The values of the 11 columns are as follows:

1) Unique identifier for a particular word/affix. The first number indicates the 

whitespace/punctuation-separated token it belongs to; the second number 

indicates the morpheme within the token.

2) One of 3 values (core—the “core” part of a word; “pref”—prefix; “suff”—

suffix). The term core was chosen to avoid linguistically loaded terms such 

as stem or root. It is worth noting that clitics are split off from the remainder 

of the word and are marked as cores to indicate their word-level status 

within the conversion. Since clitics appear frequently in Arabic, it is not 

unusual for a single token to have multiple “core” lines associated with it. 

Although the definite determiner Al is considered a clitic, it is labeled as a 

“pref” for the sake of convenience—there is never any question as to where 

it attaches in a dependency tree. 

3) Identifier of the governing word. 

4) Label of the dependency on the edge.

5) The root of the token. Although the ATB’s integrated format specifies the 

SAMA (Maamouri et al., LDC2010L01) lemma identifiers for the words, it 

does not provide the root that the lemma is derived from (Most roots in 

Arabic are sequences of 3 or 4 characters). Therefore, the values in this field 

were populated automatically using a utility program that accesses the 

SAMA database.

6) The lemma identifier in the SAMA database for the given word.

7) Original text.

8) Transliterated text (transliterated using the popular Buckwalter 

transliteration scheme).
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9) Part-of-speech label.

10) Gloss (definition).

11) Sparsely populated field used to indicate co-indexing for resumptive 

pronouns/affixes.

Thus, taken together, fields 1, 2, and 3 define the labeled dependency edges 

between all the “core” elements of the sentence. The “pref” and “suff” morphemes 

are implicitly linked with their adjacent cores, and many of their fields are left 

empty (indicated by a hyphen). 

3. Part-of-Speech (POS) Tag Scheme

The POS tag scheme is similar to the scheme used by the ATB but has a variety of 

modifications. One important note is that any portion of the original POS label that 

corresponds to an unwritten portion of a word is simply dropped. For example, if 

the original label for the token was DET+NOUN+CASE_DEF_GEN but the final

kaSra short vowel diacritic—the typical indicator of genitive case—was not 

written, the DET label would appear on one line with the Al definite determiner, 

the NOUN label would appear on a line with the core noun text, and the 

CASE_DEF_GEN portion would simply be dropped because it does not correspond 

to a written morpheme. Most of the mappings are 1-to-1 and should be fairly clear 

to anyone who is already familiar with the ATB POS tag scheme; for example, 

PVSUFF_SUBJ:2FS is rewritten as PS_2_FEM_SG. A list of all the POS tags is 

provided in Appendix A. 

4. Dependency Label Scheme

For ease of understanding, many of the dependency labels have names that are 

similar or identical to the most similar dependency labels in the popular Stanford 

English dependency label scheme (de Marneffe & Manning, 2008). However, this 

is to not to say that they may always be interpreted identically. Also, some labels 

are specific to Arabic, including idafa, fidafa, and kccmp. A complete listing of the 

AATB dependency labels is given in Appendix B.
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5. References

Badawi El-Said, Carter Michael G, Gully Adrian. Modern written arabic: A

comprehensive grammar. Routledge, 2004.

de Marneffe, Marie-Catherine, Manning Christopher D. The stanford typed 

dependencies representation. COLING 2008: Proceedings of the Workshop on 

Cross-Framework and Cross-Domain Parser Evaluation. Association for 

Computational Linguistics, 2008.

Maamouri Mohamed, Bies Ann, Kulick Seth, Gaddeche Fatma, Mekki Wigdan,

Krouna Sondos, Bouziri Basma, Zaghouani Wajdi. Arabic treebank: Part 1 v 

4.1 LDC2010T13. Web Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 

2010.

Maamouri Mohamed, Bies Ann, Kulick Seth, Gaddeche Fatma, Mekki Wigdan,

Krouna Sondos, Bouziri Basma, Zaghouani Wajdi. Arabic treebank: Part 2 v 

3.1 LDC2011T09. Web Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 

2011.

Maamouri Mohamed, Bies Ann, Kulick Seth, Krouna Sondos, Gaddeche Fatma,

Zaghouani Wajdi. Arabic treebank: Part 3 v 3.2 LDC2010T08. Web 

Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 2010.

Maamouri Mohamed, Bies Ann, Kulick Seth, Krouna Sondos, Tabassi Dalila, Ciul

Michael. Arabic treebank - Broadcast News v1.0 LDC2012T07. Web 

Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 2012.

Maamouri Mohamed, Graff David, Bouziri Basma, Krouna Sondos, Bies Ann,

Kulick Seth. LDC Standard Arabic Morphological Analyzer (SAMA) version 

3.1 LDC2010L01. Web Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, 

2010.

Ryding Karin C. A reference grammar of modern standard arabic. Cambridge 

University Press, 2005.

Tratz Stephen. A cross-task flexible transition model for arabic tokenization, affix 

detection, affix labeling, POS tagging, and dependency parsing. Proceedings 

of the 4th Workshop on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich 

Languages. 2013.

Tratz Stephen, Voss Clare, Laoudi Jamal. Resumptive pronoun detection for 

modern standard arabic to english MT. Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on 

Hybrid Approaches to Translation (HyTra)@ EACL. 2014.
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Appendix A. Part-of-Speech Tag List
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The following is a complete list of the part-of-speech tags that appear within the 

AADT. For convenience, the list is split into 3 sublists based upon whether the tag 

is used with elements labeled as “core,” “pref,” or “suff,” respectively.

A-1 Part-of-Speech Labels for ‘core’

ABBREV Abbreviation

ADJ Adjective

ADJ_COMP Comparative or superlative 

adjective

ADJ_NUM Ordinal number

ADV Adverb

CONJ Coordinating conjunction

CONNEC_PART Connective particle

#DEM_PRON – Demonstrative pronoun

DEM_PRON (Non-specific gender and number)

DEM_PRON_FEM Feminine

DEM_PRON_FEM_DU Feminine dual

DEM_PRON_FEM_SG Feminine singular

DEM_PRON_MASC_DU Masculine dual

DEM_PRON_MASC_SG Masculine singular

DEM_PRON_PL Plural

DIALECT Dialect

EMPHATIC_PART Emphatic particle

EXCLAM_PRON Exclamatory pronoun

FOCUS_PART Focus particle

FOREIGN Foreign transliterated word

FUT_PART Future particle

INNA Inna or one of her sisters

INTERJ Interjection

INTERROG_PART Interrogative particle

JUS_PART Jussive particle

LATIN Latin script token

NEG_PART Negative particle

NOUN Noun

NOUN_NUM Cardinal number

NOUN_PROP Proper noun

NOUN_QUANT Quantifier noun

NUMERIC_COMMA Numeric comma (letter reh used as 

comma)

PART Particle

PARTIAL Partial

PREP Preposition (true prepositions 

only)

#PRON – Pronoun

PRON_AG_1_PL Accusative/genitive 1st person 

plural

PRON_AG_1_SG Accusative/genitive 1st person 

singular

PRON_AG_2_DU Accusative/genitive 2nd person dual

PRON_AG_2_FEM_PL Accusative/genitive 2nd person 

feminine plural
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PRON_AG_2_FEM_SG Accusative/genitive 2nd person 

feminine singular

PRON_AG_2_MASC_PL Accusative/genitive 2nd person 

masculine plural

PRON_AG_2_MASC_SG Accusative/genitive 2nd person 

masculine sing.

PRON_AG_3_DU Accusative/genitive 3rd person dual

PRON_AG_3_FEM_PL Accusative/genitive 3rd person 

feminine plural

PRON_AG_3_FEM_SG Accusative/genitive 3rd person 

feminine singular

PRON_AG_3_MASC_PL Accusative/genitive 3rd person 

masculine plural

PRON_AG_3_MASC_SG Accusative/genitive 3rd person 

masculine singular

PRON_NOM_1_PL Nominative 1st person plural

PRON_NOM_1_SG Nominative 1st person singular

PRON_NOM_2_FEM_SG Nominative 2nd person feminine 

singular

PRON_NOM_2_MASC_PL Nominative 2nd person masculine 

plural

PRON_NOM_2_MASC_SG Nominative 2nd person masculine 

singular

PRON_NOM_3_DU Nominative 3rd person dual

PRON_NOM_3_FEM_PL Nominative 3rd person feminine dual

PRON_NOM_3_FEM_SG Nominative 3rd person feminine 

singular

PRON_NOM_3_MASC_PL Nominative 3rd person masculine 

plural

PRON_NOM_3_MASC_SG Nominative 3rd person masculine 

singular

PUNC Punctuation

RC_PART Result clause particle (introduces 

apodosis)

RESTRIC_PART Restrictive particle

RI_ADV Relative or interrogative adverbial

#RI_PRON – Relative or interrogative pronoun

RI_PRON_DEF Definite

RI_PRON_FEM_DU_AG_DEF Feminine dual accusative/genitive 

definite

RI_PRON_FEM_DU_NOM_DEF Feminine dual nominative definite

RI_PRON_FEM_PL_DEF Feminine plural definite

RI_PRON_FEM_SG_DEF Feminine singular definite

RI_PRON_INDEF Indefinite

RI_PRON_MASC_DU_AG_DEF Masculine dual accusative/genitive 

definite

RI_PRON_MASC_DU_NOM_DEF Masculine dual nominative definite

RI_PRON_MASC_PL_DEF Masculine plural definite

RI_PRON_MASC_SG_DEF Masculine singular definite

SUB_CONJ Subordinating conjunction

TRANSERR Transcription error

TYPO Typo

VB_CV Command verb

VB_IV Imperfect verb
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VB_IV_PASS Imperfect verb passive voice

VB_PV Perfect verb

VB_PV_PASS Perfect verb passive voice

VERB_PART Verb particle (laqado and qado)

VOC_PART Vocative particle

A-2 Part-of-Speech Labels for ‘pref’

DET Determiner (NOTE: On occasion, the Al 

determiner will appear unattached; in this 

relatively rare situation, the determiner is 

considered a ‘core’.)

#IP – Imperfect verb prefix

IP_1_PL 1st person plural

IP_1_SG 1st person singular

IP_2_DU 2nd person dual

IP_2_FEM_PL 2nd person feminine plural

IP_2_FEM_SG 2nd person feminine singular

IP_2_MASC_PL 2nd person masculine plural

IP_2_MASC_SG 2nd person masculine singular

IP_3_FEM_DU 3rd person feminine dual

IP_3_FEM_PL 3rd person feminine plural

IP_3_FEM_SG 3rd person feminine singular

IP_3_MASC_DU 3rd person masculine dual

IP_3_MASC_PL 3rd person masculine plural

IP_3_MASC_SG 3rd person masculine singular

A-3 Part-of-Speech Labels for ‘suff’

#CASE – Case marker

CASE_DEF_ACC Definite accusative

CASE_DEF_GEN Definite genitive

CASE_DEF_NOM Definite nominative

CASE_INDEF_ACC Indefinite accusative

CASE_INDEF_GEN Indefinite genitive

CASE_INDEF_NOM Indefinite nominative

#CS – Command verb suffix

CS_2_DU 2nd person dual

CS_2_FEM_SG 2nd person feminine singular

CS_2_MASC_PL 2nd person masculine plural

CS_2_MASC_SG 2nd person masculine singular

#IS – Imperfect verb suffix

IS_2_FEM_SG_i 2nd person feminine singular indicative

IS_2_FEM_SG_s_j 2nd person feminine singular 

subjunctive/jussive

IS_DU_i Dual indicative

IS_DU_s_j Dual subjunctive/jussive

IS_FEM_PL Feminine plural

IS_MASC_PL_i Masculine plural indicative

IS_MASC_PL_s_j Masculine plural subjunctive/jussive

IS_i Indicative

IS_j Jussive

IS_s Subjunctive
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#NS – Nominal suffix

NS_FEM_DU_AG Feminine dual accusative/genitive

NS_FEM_DU_AG_POSS Feminine dual accusative/genitive 

possessed

NS_FEM_DU_NOM Feminine dual nominative

NS_FEM_DU_NOM_POSS Feminine dual nominative possessed

NS_FEM_PL Feminine plural

NS_FEM_SG Feminine singular

NS_MASC_DU_AG Masculine dual accusative/genitive

NS_MASC_DU_AG_POSS Masculine dual accusative/genitive 

possessed

NS_MASC_DU_NOM Masculine dual nominative

NS_MASC_DU_NOM_POSS Masculine dual nominative possessed

NS_MASC_PL_AG Masculine plural accusative/genitive

NS_MASC_PL_AG_POSS Masculine plural accusative/genitive 

possessed

NS_MASC_PL_NOM Masculine plural nominative

NS_MASC_PL_NOM_POSS Masculine plural nominative possessed

#PS – Perfect verb suffix

PS_1_PL 1st person plural

PS_1_SG 1st person singular

PS_2_FEM_SG 2nd person singular

PS_2_MASC_PL 2nd person masculine plural

PS_2_MASC_SG 2nd person masculine singular

PS_3_FEM_DU 3rd person feminine dual

PS_3_FEM_PL 3rd person feminine plural

PS_3_FEM_SG 3rd person singular

PS_3_MASC_DU 3rd person masculine dual

PS_3_MASC_PL 3rd person masculine plural

PS_3_MASC_SG 3rd person masculine singular
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Appendix B. Dependency Labels List
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The following is a complete list of the dependency labels that appear within the 

AADT.

adv Adverbial modifier; includes adverbs as well as other words used 

adverbially including various preposition-like nouns and other words. 

advcl Adverbial clause or adverbial clause-like structure. 

amod Adjectival modifier. 

appos Apposition. (Ryding, 2005; pp. 224–227)

cc Connects a coordinating conjunction with a preceding conjunct. Note that 

lakinna, a sister of inna that translates as “however” or “but,” may occur with this 

dependency despite being labeled as an INNA and not a CONJ.

ccomp Clausal complement. 

combo Combination. This is currently only used with a handful of multi-word 

coordinating conjunction expressions.

conj Connects a conjunct with a preceding coordinating conjunction or 

conjunct.

cop Complement of copula. 

dep Other or unknown dependency.

det Determiner. 

fidafa “False” idafa. Unlike typical idafa constructions, which are headed by 

nouns, these are headed by adjectives. (Ryding, 2005; pp. 221–223)

flat Flat. This is used for names and similar phenomena that lack syntactic 

structure, or at least any syntactic annotation.

icc Initial coordinating conjunction. Arabic sentences frequently begin with 

a coordinating conjunction. For this and similar situations, icc is used instead of 

connecting the head of the sentence to the coordinating conjunction via a conj

dependency.

idafa Idafa construction. Note that in the AADT, the "Quotation or title 

relationship'"(cf. Ryding, 2005; p.210) is treated as apposition rather than idafa.

intj Interjection.

iobj Indirect object.
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kccomp Clausal complement of kAna. This is separated from the more general 

ccomp dependency because the verb kAna, following another verb, can be used to 

express continued or habitual action in the past (Ryding, 2005; pp. 446–447).

neg Negation.

obj Direct object.

ocomp Object complement.

parataxis Parataxis. Used to connect to sentences together that are written next 

to each other but that are not connected by an explicit coordinating conjunction. 

part Particle modifier. Used with a variety of different particles, including the 

future particle. Note that NEG_PART will typically appear with a neg dependency 

and FOCUS_PART is treated as if it were a preposition.

pcomp Object/complement of a true preposition.

prep Preposition modifier. Links a true preposition to its governor.

punct Punctuation.

reladv Relative adverbial modifier.

ricomp Complement of a relative or interrogative pronoun/adverb.

sc Subordinating conjunction. Used with subordinating conjunctions other 

than “inna and her sisters.”

subj Subject. This may occur without a verb, as with equational sentences.

tmz Tamyiiz. (Ryding, 2005)

tpc Topicalized element (not including topicalized subjects).

voc Vocative.

xrrcl Relative clause with an explicit relativizer. 

zrrcl Relative clause without an explicit relativizer (zero relativizer).
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