An Arabic Transformation Based Approach to Automatic Paraphrasing of Syntactic Sentences

International audience The aim of this paper is to exploit the existing Lexicon-Grammar tables, as well as to assess their relative importance vis-à-vis the concepts of transformation and automatic paraphrasing. These operations include multiple processes at the lexical, morpho-syntactic, and semantic levels. Our proposal is to model highly productive phenomena of the Arabic language, such as pronominalization and passivization, applied to both verbs and Multiword Expressions (MWEs), in order to formalize the relation between syntactic structures and their semantic properties and then to identify pairs of sentences that share a predicate comprising a noun and a support verb. Furthermore, the automatic process of paraphrasing involves both the distributional and transformative features of each class of verbs or other structures such as MWEs. This research in progress outlines how to build Lexicon-Grammar tables for Arabic syntactic constructions by using automatic paraphrasing in a large transformational grammar on the one hand, and to implement it into both NooJ electronic dictionaries and local grammars on the other hand.