A Single-Model Approach for Arabic Segmentation, POS-Tagging and Named Entity Recognition

This paper presents an entirely new, one-million-word an- notated corpus for a comprehensive, machine-learning-based preprocess- ing of text in Modern Standard Arabic. Contrarily to the conventional pipeline architecture, we solve the NLP tasks of word segmentation, POS tagging and named entity recognition as a single sequence labeling task. This single-component configuration results in a faster operation and is able to provide state-of-the-art precision and recall according to our evaluations. The fine-grained output tag set output by our annotator greatly simplifies downstream tasks such as lemmatization. Provided as a trained OpenNLP component, the annotator is publicly free for re- search purposes.