A generative-informed neuro-symbolic framework for syntactic ambiguity resolution: Evidence from Arabic DPs
Authors: Mohammed Damom, Mohammed Q. Shormani, Muneef Y. Alshawsh, Ashraf A. Naji, Mustafa Ali Alhamzi, Fawwaz An-Nashef, Jameel Ahmed Elayah, Noman AL-Sayadi
Organizations: Hajjah University · Ibb University · Sana'a University
Syntactic ambiguity poses a persistent challenge for Arabic NLP, particularly in morphologically rich nominal constructions where multiple structu6ral interpretations may be compatible with the same surface sequence. This study proposes a generatively informed neuro-symbolic framework for resolving structural ambiguity in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) DPs. The framework integrates generative syntactic notions with AraBERT by representing ambiguity as a candidate-based decision task in which linguistically motivated alternatives are explicitly constructed and evaluated through candidate-conditioned input representations. Findings indicate that the model achieved 96.88% accuracy, 95.92% macro-F1, 96.83% weighted F1, and 93.94% binary F1 on the unseen evaluation set. Class-level analysis revealed asymmetric performance, with recall of 99.71% for High/VP Attachment (N1) and 89.26% for Low/NP/Embedded Attachment (N2), indicating greater difficulty in recovering the embedded interpretation. The study concludes that formal syntactic representations can be operationalized within Transformer-based NLP as an explicit interface between linguistic structure and contextual neural modeling, providing a controlled and interpretable approach to Arabic syntactic ambiguity resolution and beyond.
LLMs perform strongly across NLP, but their ability to produce explicit grammatical analyses remains unclear. Arabic provides a challenging testbed due to its rich morphology and orthographic ambiguity, which create strong morphology-syntax interactions. We present a unified evaluation of LLMs on Arabic morphosyntactic tagging and dependency parsing, covering pre-tokenized, raw-text, and cascaded settings. We compare zero-shot prompting with retrieval-based in-context learning. Relevant demonstrations substantially improve performance. The strongest LLMs approach supervised tagging and parsing systems; however, they require substantial annotated data for demonstration retrieval and considerable computational resources. We make all code and data used in this paper publicly available.
Mohamed Adel, Bashar Alhafni, Nizar Habash
Computational Approaches to Modeling Language Lab 1New York University Abu Dhabi · 2Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
Dependency parsing resource development for Arabic has largely focused on Modern Standard Arabic, leaving dialectal Arabic comparatively under-resourced. We introduce MADARTB, the first large-scale parallel dependency treebank spanning five city dialects: Beirut, Cairo, Doha, Rabat and Tunis, and extending an existing parallel MSA version. In total MADARTB consists of 5,000 sentences annotated using the CATiB dependency scheme. We analyze syntactic similarity across all city dialects and MSA. Although global construction profiles exhibit high similarity across varieties, local syntactic structures frequently diverge, revealing substantial structural variation across dialects. We further establish a cross-dialect dependency parsing comparison using a supervised parser and four LLMs. The supervised parser achieves 87.5% LAS, while the best LLM setup trails at 85.7% LAS across all six varieties on the test set. We release our annotations and models publicly.
Noor Abo Mokh, Mohamed Adel, Jamila El-Gizuli +3
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence · Computational Approaches to Modeling Language Lab, New York University Abu Dhabi
While recent Arabic NLP benchmarks focus on scale, they often rely on synthetic or translated data which may benefit from deeper linguistic verification. We introduce ALPS (Arabic Linguistic & Pragmatic Suite), a native, expert-curated diagnostic challenge set probing Deep Semantics and Pragmatics, capabilities that complement specialized large-scale benchmarks. While broad-coverage benchmarks prioritize scale and multi-task coverage, ALPS targets the depth of linguistic understanding through 531 rigorously crafted questions across 15 tasks and 47 subtasks. We developed the dataset with deep expertise in Arabic linguistics, guaranteeing cultural authenticity and eliminating translation artifacts. Evaluating 23 diverse models (commercial, open-source, and Arabic-native) against a single-pass human performance (avg. 84.6% accuracy) and an expert-adjudicated oracle (99.2%), we reveal a critical dissociation: models achieve high fluency but fail on fundamental morpho-syntactic dependencies, with elevated error rates on morpho-syntactic dependencies (36.5% across diacritics-reliant tasks) compared to compositional semantics. While top commercial models (Gemini-3-flash at 94.2%) surpass the average single human, a substantial gap persists between commercial giants and Arabic-native models, with the best Arabic-specific model (Jais-2-70B at 83.6%) approaching but not matching human performance.