Annotating Verbal Multiword Expressions in Arabic: Assessing the Validity of a Multilingual Annotation Procedure

Abstract : This paper describes our efforts to extend the PARSEME framework to Modern Standard Arabic. The applicability of the PARSEME guidelines was tested by measuring the inter-annotator agreement in the early annotation stage. A subset of 1,062 sentences from the Prague Arabic Dependency Treebank PADT was selected and annotated by two Arabic native speakers independently. Following their annotations, a new Arabic corpus with over 1,250 annotated VMWEs has been built. This corpus already exceeds the smallest corpora of the PARSEME suite, and enables first observations. We discuss our annotation guideline schema that shows full MWE annotation is realizable in Arabic where we get good inter-annotator agreement.