Is Arabic punctuation rule-governed?

Abstract

This paper investigates the extent to which Arabic punctuation is rule-governed, with the aim of improving text comprehension, disambiguation, and machine translation. The study highlights the lack of systematic punctuation in Arabic written discourse, which may be attributed to difficulties in sentence boundary identification or inadequate differentiation between various conjunctions. The punctuation behavior of Arabic speakers is examined in relation to sentence boundary identification and the level of agreement among Arabic specialists is assessed. A quantitative analysis of paragraph and sentence lengths across genres, categories of writers, and in comparison to English is conducted using five corpora specifically compiled for this study. Additionally, a punctuation survey is carried out to evaluate specialists’ agreement on sentence boundary identification. The results indicate that writers of Arabic interpret punctuation rules differently and that Arabic punctuation practice is irregular. The study suggests that standardization of Arabic punctuation rules is necessary to facilitate comprehension and automatic text processing.

Keywords

• Arabic punctuation
• sentence boundary identification
• text disambiguation
• machine translation
• punctuation standardization
• Jeroen van de Weijer, College of International Studies, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China