A Pilot Arabic CCGbank

We describe a process for converting the Penn Arabic Treebank into the CCG formalism. Previous efforts have yielded CCGbanks in English, German, and Turkish, thus opening these languages to the sophisticated computational tools developed for CCG and enabling further cross-linguistic development. Conversion from a context free grammar treebank to a CCGbank is a four stage process: head finding, argument classification, binarization, and category conversion. In the process of implementing a basic CCGbank conversion algorithm, we reveal properties of Arabic grammar that interfere with conversion, such as subject topicalization, genitive constructions, relative clauses, and optional pronominal subjects. All of these problematic phenomena can be resolved in a variety of ways - we discuss advantages and disadvantages of each in their respective sections. We detail these and describe our categorial analysis of each of these Arabic grammatical phenomena in depth, as well as technical details on their integration into the conversion algorithm.