ALP: An Arabic Linguistic Pipeline

This paper presents ALP, an entirely new linguistic pipeline for natural language processing of text in Modern Standard Arabic. In contrary to the conventional pipeline architecture, we solve common NLP operations of word segmentation, POS tagging, and named entity recognition as a single sequence labeling task. Based on this single component, we also introduce a new lemmatizer tool that combines machine-learning-based and dictionary-based approaches, the latter providing increased accuracy, robustness, and flexibility to the former. In addition, we present a base phrase chunking tool which is an essential tool in many NLP operations. The presented pipeline configuration results in a faster operation and is able to provide a solution to the challenges of processing Modern Standard Arabic, such as the rich morphology, agglutinative aspects, and lexical ambiguity due to the absence of short vowels.