The Interactive Arabic Dictionary: Another Collaboratively Constructed Language Resource

Abstract

Dictionaries are very essential resources that almost all Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications use. Since language is constantly evolving, new words or new meanings to current words continuously appear. In order to keep a dictionary up-to-date, an enrichment process is needed to incorporate new vocabularies. In the last decade, a new approach of resources construction has emerged based on the collaboration between different users on the Web. In this paper, we present the Interactive Arabic Dictionary (IAD): a monolingual web-based dictionary. Initially based on the "Almuajam Alwasseet" dictionary, IAD provides the different meanings of Arabic words, with specific morphological and syntactical information, in addition to other related information such as example sentences, multimedia illustrations, associated words, semantic domains, expressions, linguistic avails, common mistakes. Authorized users can collaboratively enrich the content of the dictionary through the use of a "controlled process" to add or modify entries, meanings, or any kind of detailed information related to them. This "controlled process" consists of a suggestion-validation procedure in order to maintain the integrity of the dictionary. This enrichment process will expand the dictionary content, allowing its future exploitation in high level NLP applications.