Current research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tends to exploit corpus resources as a way of overcoming the problem of knowledge acquisition. Statistical analysis of corpora can reveal trends and probabilities of occurrence, which have proved to be helpful in various ways. Machine Translation (MT) is no exception to this trend. Many MT researchers have attempted to extract knowledge from parallel bilingual corpora. The MT problem is generally decomposed into two sub-problems: lexical selection and reordering of the selected words. This research addresses the problem of lexical selection of open-class lexical items in the framework of MT. The work reported in this thesis investigates different methodologies to handle this problem, using a corpus-based approach. The current framework can be applied to any language pair, but we focus on Arabic and English. This is because Arabic words are hugely ambiguous and thus pose a challenge for the current task of lexical selection. We use a challenging Arabic-English parallel corpus, containing many long passages with no punctuation marks to denote sentence boundaries. This points to the robustness of the adopted approach. In our attempt to extract lexical equivalents from the parallel corpus we focus on the co-occurrence relations between words. The current framework adopts a lexicon-free approach towards the selection of lexical equivalents. This has the double advantage of investigating the effectiveness of different techniques without being distracted by the properties of the lexicon and at the same time saving much time and effort, since constructing a lexicon is time-consuming and labour-intensive. Thus, we use as little, if any, hand-coded information as possible. The accuracy score could be improved by adding hand-coded information. The point of the work reported here is to see how well one can do without any such manual intervention. With this goal in mind, we carry out a number of preprocessing steps in our framework. First, we build a lexicon-free Part-of-Speech (POS) tagger for Arabic. This POS tagger uses a combination of rule-based, transformation-based learning (TBL) and probabilistic techniques. Similarly, we use a lexicon-free POS tagger for English. We use the two POS taggers to tag the bi-texts. Second, we develop lexicon-free shallow parsers for Arabic and English. The two parsers are then used to label the parallel corpus with dependency relations (DRs) for some critical constructions. Third, we develop stemmers for Arabic and English, adopting the same knowledge -free approach. These preprocessing steps pave the way for the main system (or proposer) whose task is to extract translational equivalents from the parallel corpus. The framework starts with automatically extracting a bilingual lexicon using unsupervised statistical techniques which exploit the notion of co-occurrence patterns in the parallel corpus. We then choose the target word that has the highest frequency of occurrence from among a number of translational candidates in the extracted lexicon in order to aid the selection of the contextually correct translational equivalent. These experiments are carried out on either raw or POS-tagged texts. Having labelled the bi-texts with DRs, we use them to extract a number of translation seeds to start a number of bootstrapping techniques to improve the proposer. These seeds are used as anchor points to resegment the parallel corpus and start the selection process once again. The final F-score for the selection process is 0.701. We have also written an algorithm for detecting ambiguous words in a translation lexicon and obtained a precision score of 0.89.

This thesis explores a range of approaches to the task of recognising textual entailment (RTE), i.e. determining whether one text snippet entails another, for Arabic, where we are faced with an exceptional level of lexical and structural ambiguity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to carry out this task for Arabic. Tree edit distance (TED) has been widely used as a component of natural language processing (NLP) systems that attempt to achieve the goal above, with the distance between pairs of dependency trees being taken as a measure of the likelihood that one entails the other. Such a technique relies on having accurate linguistic analyses. Obtaining such analyses for Arabic is notoriously difficult. To overcome these problems we have investigated strategies for improving tagging and parsing depending on system combination techniques. These strategies lead to substantially better performance than any of the contributing tools. We describe also a semi-automatic technique for creating a first dataset for RTE for Arabic using an extension of the ‘headline-lead paragraph’ technique because there are, again to the best of our knowledge, no such datasets available. We sketch the difficulties inherent in volunteer annotators-based judgment, and describe a regime to ameliorate some of these. The major contribution of this thesis is the introduction of two ways of improving the standard TED: (i) we present a novel approach, extended TED (ETED), for extending the standard TED algorithm for calculating the distance between two trees by allowing operations to apply to subtrees, rather than just to single nodes. This leads to useful improvements over the performance of the standard TED for determining entailment. The key here is that subtrees tend to correspond to single information units. By treating operations on subtrees as less costly than the corresponding set of individual node operations, ETED concentrates on entire information units, which are a more appropriate granularity than individual words for considering entailment relations; and (ii) we use the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm to automatically estimate the cost of edit operations for single nodes and subtrees and to determine thresholds, since assigning an appropriate cost to each edit operation manually can become a tricky task.The current findings are encouraging. These extensions can substantially affect the F-score and accuracy and achieve a better RTE model when compared with a number of string-based algorithms and the standard TED approaches. The relative performance of the standard techniques on our Arabic test set replicates the results reported for these techniques for English test sets. We have also applied ETED with ABC to the English RTE2 test set, where it again outperforms the standard TED.

Face à la quantité d'information textuelle disponible sur le web en langue arabe, le développement des Systèmes de Recherche d'Information (SRI) efficaces est devenu incontournable pour retrouver l'information pertinente. La plupart des SRIs actuels de la langue arabe reposent sur la représentation par sac de mots et l'indexation des documents et des requêtes est effectuée souvent par des mots bruts ou des racines. Ce qui conduit à plusieurs problèmes tels que l'ambigüité et la disparité des termes, etc.Dans ce travail de thèse, nous nous sommes intéressés à apporter des solutions aux problèmes d'ambigüité et de disparité des termes pour l'amélioration de la représentation des documents et le processus de l'appariement des documents et des requêtes. Nous apportons quatre contributions au niveau de processus de représentation, d'indexation et de recherche d'information en langue arabe. La première contribution consiste à représenter les documents à la fois par des termes simples et des termes complexes. Cela est justifié par le fait que les termes simples seuls et isolés de leur contexte sont ambigus et moins précis pour représenter le contenu des documents. Ainsi, nous avons proposé une méthode hybride pour l’extraction de termes complexes en langue arabe, en combinant des propriétés linguistiques et des modèles statistiques. Le filtre linguistique repose à la fois sur l'étiquetage morphosyntaxique et la prise en compte des variations pour sélectionner les termes candidats. Pour sectionner les termes candidats pertinents, nous avons introduit une mesure d'association permettant de combiner l'information contextuelle avec les degrés de spécificité et d'unité. La deuxième contribution consiste à explorer et évaluer les systèmes de recherche d’informations permettant de tenir compte de l’ensemble des éléments d’indexation (termes simples et complexes). Par conséquent, nous étudions plusieurs extensions des modèles existants de RI pour l'intégration des termes complexes. En outre, nous explorons une panoplie de modèles de proximité. Pour la prise en compte des dépendances de termes dans les modèles de RI, nous introduisons une condition caractérisant de tels modèle et leur validation théorique. La troisième contribution permet de pallier le problème de disparité des termes en proposant une méthode pour intégrer la similarité entre les termes dans les modèles de RI en s'appuyant sur les représentations distribuées des mots (RDMs). L'idée sous-jacente consiste à permettre aux termes similaires à ceux de la requête de contribuer aux scores des documents. Les extensions des modèles de RI proposées dans le cadre de cette méthode sont validées en utilisant les contraintes heuristiques d'appariement sémantique. La dernière contribution concerne l'amélioration des modèles de rétro-pertinence (Pseudo Relevance Feedback PRF). Étant basée également sur les RDM, notre méthode permet d'intégrer la similarité entre les termes d'expansions et ceux de la requête dans les modèles standards PRF. La validation expérimentale de l'ensemble des contributions apportées dans le cadre de cette thèse est effectuée en utilisant la collection standard TREC 2002/2001 de la langue arabe. / Given the amount of Arabic textual information available on the web, developing effective Information Retrieval Systems (IRS) has become essential to retrieve relevant information. Most of the current Arabic SRIs are based on the bag-of-words representation, where documents are indexed using surface words, roots or stems. Two main drawbacks of the latter representation are the ambiguity of Single Word Terms (SWTs) and term mismatch.The aim of this work is to deal with SWTs ambiguity and term mismatch. Accordingly, we propose four contributions to improve Arabic content representation, indexing, and retrieval. The first contribution consists of representing Arabic documents using Multi-Word Terms (MWTs). The latter is motivated by the fact that MWTs are more precise representational units and less ambiguous than isolated SWTs. Hence, we propose a hybrid method to extract Arabic MWTs, which combines linguistic and statistical filtering of MWT candidates. The linguistic filter uses POS tagging to identify MWTs candidates that fit a set of syntactic patterns and handles the problem of MWTs variation. Then, the statistical filter rank MWT candidate using our proposed association measure that combines contextual information and both termhood and unithood measures. In the second contribution, we explore and evaluate several IR models for ranking documents using both SWTs and MWTs. Additionally, we investigate a wide range of proximity-based IR models for Arabic IR. Then, we introduce a formal condition that IR models should satisfy to deal adequately with term dependencies. The third contribution consists of a method based on Distributed Representation of Word vectors, namely Word Embedding (WE), for Arabic IR. It relies on incorporating WE semantic similarities into existing probabilistic IR models in order to deal with term mismatch. The aim is to allow distinct, but semantically similar terms to contribute to documents scores. The last contribution is a method to incorporate WE similarity into Pseud-Relevance Feedback PRF for Arabic Information Retrieval. The main idea is to select expansion terms using their distribution in the set of top pseudo-relevant documents along with their similarity to the original query terms. The experimental validation of all the proposed contributions is performed using standard Arabic TREC 2002/2001 collection.