A generative-informed neuro-symbolic framework for syntactic ambiguity resolution: Evidence from Arabic DPs

Abstract

Syntactic ambiguity poses a persistent challenge for Arabic NLP, particularly in morphologically rich nominal constructions where multiple structu6ral interpretations may be compatible with the same surface sequence. This study proposes a generatively informed neuro-symbolic framework for resolving structural ambiguity in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) DPs. The framework integrates generative syntactic notions with AraBERT by representing ambiguity as a candidate-based decision task in which linguistically motivated alternatives are explicitly constructed and evaluated through candidate-conditioned input representations. Findings indicate that the model achieved 96.88% accuracy, 95.92% macro-F1, 96.83% weighted F1, and 93.94% binary F1 on the unseen evaluation set. Class-level analysis revealed asymmetric performance, with recall of 99.71% for High/VP Attachment (N1) and 89.26% for Low/NP/Embedded Attachment (N2), indicating greater difficulty in recovering the embedded interpretation. The study concludes that formal syntactic representations can be operationalized within Transformer-based NLP as an explicit interface between linguistic structure and contextual neural modeling, providing a controlled and interpretable approach to Arabic syntactic ambiguity resolution and beyond.