Building the First Software Program to Accurately Determine the Correct Morphological Patterns of the Arabic Trilateral Abstract Geminate verbs: (A Computational Linguistic Study, Based on a Corpus)

This unprecedented research project tackles one of the hardest issues regularly encountered by the Arabic language learners and users, be them native speakers or otherwise, namely, determining with accuracy the morphological patters / categories to which the imperfect verb in general belongs, and the trilateral geminate verb in particular ; with the latter being the main focus of this work. To this end, this project has had as its ultimate aim to develop a software program that makes the process of identification and determination much easier, and consequently facilitates the learning process and the building of better competencies and command of Arabic.To achieve such, the verbs in question were exhaustively researched and collected from al- Qāmūs al- muHīT Dictionary by Al- fayrūzabādī, and complemented from the relevant entries in lisān al-ςarab of Ibn ManĎūr and tāj al-ςarūs min jawāhir al-qāmūs of az-Zabīdi. A database of 562 entries has been created and used as the base corpus with detailed tables of the morphological conjugations. The points and range of articulation have been taken into consideration as they have an impact of the patterns the verbs follow. The developed software program has been created based on the relevant data, and various groups of language users and learners were tested to determine the importance and the need for the software. The subjects doing the test were 119, each one was given a different test containing a list of 10 verbs to determine the correct imperfect form. The correct answers ranged from 40.67 % - 50.80 % showing a dire need to the software developed as part of this study. Additionally, this through and exhaustive investigation has resulted in identifying four categories to which the verbs in question belong to, signaling another important revelation in the study of Arabic verbs.