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International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems

NLDB 2019: Natural Language Processing and Information Systems pp 234–246Cite as

An Arabic-Multilingual Database with a Lexicographic Search Engine

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11608))

Abstract

We present a lexicographic search engine built on top of the largest Arabic multilingual database, allowing people to search and retrieve translations, synonyms, definitions, and more. The database currently contains about 150 Arabic multilingual lexicons that we have been digitizing, restructuring, and normalizing over 9 years. It comprises most types of lexical resources, such as modern and classical lexicons, thesauri, glossaries, lexicographic datasets, and (bi/)tri-lingual dictionaries. This is in addition to the Arabic Ontology – an Arabic WordNet with ontologically cleaned content, which is being used to reference and interlink lexical concepts. The search engine was developed with the state-of-the-art design features and according to the W3C’s recommendation and best practices for publishing data on the web, as well as the W3C’s Lemon RDF model. The search engine is publicly available at (https://ontology.birzeit.edu).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Developed by LDC, accessible at: https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2010L01.

  2. 2.

    An open source project, accessible at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/sarf/.

  3. 3.

    http://ontology.birzeit.edu/concept/293198.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are thankful to Mohannad Saidi, Mohammad Dwaikat, and other students and former employees who helped us in the technical development and digitization phases. We would like to also thank John P. McCrae for helping us in representing our lexical data in the W3C lemon model. We are also thankful to all lexicon owners, especially the ALECSO team who provided us with many lexicons and supported us in the digitization process.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Birzeit University, Birzeit, Palestine

    Mustafa Jarrar & Hamzeh Amayreh

Authors
  1. Mustafa Jarrar
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  2. Hamzeh Amayreh
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mustafa Jarrar .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris, France

    Elisabeth Métais

  2. University of Salford, Salford, UK

    Farid Meziane

  3. University of Salford, Salford, UK

    Sunil Vadera

  4. Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

    Vijayan Sugumaran

  5. CSE, University of Salford, Salford, UK

    Mohamad Saraee

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Jarrar, M., Amayreh, H. (2019). An Arabic-Multilingual Database with a Lexicographic Search Engine. In: Métais, E., Meziane, F., Vadera, S., Sugumaran, V., Saraee, M. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Information Systems. NLDB 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11608. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23281-8_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23281-8_19

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-23280-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-23281-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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