PARSEME-AR: Arabic reference corpus for multiword expressions using PARSEME annotation guidelines

In this paper we present PARSEME-AR, the first openly available Arabic corpus manually annotated for Verbal Multiword Expressions (VMWEs). The annotation process is carried out based on guidelines put forward by PARSEME, a multilingual project for more than 26 languages. The corpus contains 4749 VMWEs in about 7500 sentences taken from the Prague Arabic Dependency Treebank. The results notably show a high degree of discontinuity in Arabic VMWEs in comparison to other languages in the PARSEME suite. We also propose analyses of interesting and challenging phenomena encountered during the annotation process. Moreover, we offer the first benchmark for the VMWE identification task in Arabic, by training two state-of-the-art systems, on our Arabic data.