The architecture of a standard Arabic lexical database

Abstract

This paper is a contribution to the issuewhich has, in the course of the last decade, become critical-of the basic requirements and validation criteria for lexical language resources in Standard Arabic. The work is based on a critical analysis of the architecture of the DIINAR.1 lexical database, the entries of which are associated with grammar-lexis relations operating at word-form level (i.e. in morphological analysis). Investigation shows a crucial difference, in the concept of 'lexical database', between source program and generated lexica. The source program underlying DIINAR.1 is analysed, and some figures and ratios are presented. The original categorisations are, in the course of scrutiny, partly revisited. Results and ratios given here for basic entries on the one hand, and for generated lexica of inflected word-forms on the other. They aim at giving a first answer to the question of the ratios between the number of lemma-entries and inflected word-forms that can be expected to be included in, or generated by, a Standard Arabic lexical dB. These ratios can be considered as one overall language-specific criterion for the analysis, evaluation and validation of lexical dB-s in Arabic.

ISO standard modeling of a large Arabic dictionary

“…Most of the existing lexical resources deal with a unique linguistic level and are generally adapted to the specific needs of the intended applications. Examples of lexicons covering the morphosyntactic level are the Buckwalter lexicon (Buckwalter 2004), Morph2 system lexicon (Chaâben et al 2010), ElixirFM lexicon (Smrž 2007), DIINAR lexical database (Abbès et al 2004), Nooj Arabic Dictionary (Mesfar and Silberztein, 2008), AraComLex lexicon (Attia et al 2011), AraLex (Boudelaa and Marslen-Wilson 2010), Unitex lexicon (Doumi et al 2013) and SALMA lexicon (Sawalha, Atwell and Abushariah 2013). For the semantic level, the Arabic WordNet (Elkateb et al 2006) seems to be the most used one.…”

“…The resources for human use are organized according to the roots while including all their derived forms or according to the derived forms, which represent their roots as complementary information. For NLP use, many works such as DIINAR (Abbès et al 2004), Buckwalter lexicon (Buckwalter 2004), ElixirFM (Smrž 2007) and SALMA (Sawalha and Atwell, 2013) are based on derivational rules for generating morphosyntactic knowledge including the derived forms. In this case, the population of such resources by other levels, particularly the semantic level, hit serious problems because the words are not persistent.…”

“…Therefore, the reuse of most Arabic electronic dictionaries is difficult and their models are incomplete. For example, DIINAR (Abbès, Dichy and Hassoun 2004) covers only the morphological level; Arabic WordNet (Elkateb et al 2006) focuses on the semantic level and some lingware systems use their appropriate lexical resources such as MORPH2 (Chaâben, Hadrich and Ben Hamadou 2010).…”

Corpus Linguistic Tools for Historical Semantics in Arabic

“…It is proposed as a data-driven language learning tool for Arabic and as a tool for lexicographers and linguists. Abbès and Dichy (2008) developed AraConc as an interactive software specifically for Arabic. It integrates the Arabic word-form analyzer and generator (MorphArab) that is based on a lexicon generated from the DIINAR.1 knowledge database (DIctionnaire INformatisé del'ARabe, version 1).…”