Skip to main content

Compiling a Bilingual Lexicon Using a Semi-automatic Approach

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Arabic Language Processing: From Theory to Practice (ICALP 2024)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 2340))

Included in the following conference series:

  • 4 Accesses

Abstract

Language resources and particularly the lack of computational lexicons is one of the central problems that face making progress in Moroccan Arabic NLP tasks. Another problem is resources reusability where it is difficult to employ the few existing resources in common NLP tasks. In this paper, we propose to alleviate these problems by building a reusable bi-lingual lexicon addressing both Moroccan Arabic and Arabic languages. For this purpose, we compiled data from different sources including printed and digital lexicons as well as speech and social media text. To meet users’ needs in a systematic and easily accessible way, the developed resource is structured following the Lexical Markup Framework standard and then hosted in software architecture with full respect to interoperability rules. Our lexicon contains almost 13000 lemmas with their Arabic equivalents and is manually annotated with useful metadata such as Part of Speech, Origin, and root. The lexicon is designed for practical NLP use such as morphological analysis and automatic translation.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    http://arabic.emi.ac.ma/alelm/.

  2. 2.

    https://lemon-model.net/.

  3. 3.

    http://catalogue.elra.info/.

  4. 4.

    http://arabic.emi.ac.ma:8080/SafarWeb/faces/safar/dialect/resource/dictionaries/maded.xhtml.

References

  • Artstein, R., Poesio, M.: Inter-coder agreement for computational linguistics. Comput. Linguist. 34(4), 596 (2008)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Bouamor, H., et al.: The MADAR Arabic Dialect Corpus and Lexicon, Miyazaki, Japan, European Language Resources Association (ELRA), pp. 3387–3396 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  • Bouzoubaa, K., Jaafar, Y., Namly, D.T.R.: SAFAR Framework for Arabic Natural Language Processing. ACL, , Kyiv (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  • de PrĂ©mare, A.-L.: Dictionnaire arabe-français: langue et culture marocaines. L’Harmattan, s.l. (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  • Fellbaum, C., Miller, G.: WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database. MIT Press, s.l. (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  • Francopoulo, G., et al.: Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) for NLP Multilingual Resources, pp. 1–8. Association for Computational Linguistics, Sydney (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  • Grefenstette, G.: The Future of Linguistics and Lexicographers: Will there be Lexicographers in the Year 3000?, pp. 25–41. Euralex, Liège (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  • Guellil, I., Saâdane, H., Azouaou, F., Gueni, B., Nouvel, D.: Arabic natural language processing: an overview. J. King Saud Univ. Comput. Inf. Sci. 1319–1578 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jksuci.2019.02.006

  • Habash, N., Diab, M., Rabmow, O.: Conventional Orthography for Dialectal Arabic. s.n., Istanbul (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  • Habash, N., et al.: Unified Guidelines and Resources for Arabic Dialect Orthography. European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Miyazaki (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  • Harrell, R.S.: A Dictionary of Moroccan Arabic: Moroccan English. Georgetown University Press, s.l. (1963)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Iraqui Sinaceur, Z.: Le Dictionnaire Colin d’Arabe Dialectal Marocain. Ministère des Affaires Culturelles, al-Manahil (1994)

    Google Scholar 

  • Jaafar, H.: PhD Thesis: Les noms et les adjectifs en arabe marocain. s.n., Fes (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  • Cohen, J.: A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educ. Psychol. Measur. 20(1), 37–46 (1960)

    Google Scholar 

  • Litkowski, K.C.: Computational lexicons and dictionaries. Encyclopedia Lang. Linguist. 2, 753–761 (2005)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Meniani, H.: Moroccan Arabic Origins. GMS Print, Casablanca (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  • Mrini, K., Bond, F.: Building the Moroccan Darija Wordnet (MDW) using Bilingual Resources. s.n., Casablanca (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  • Mrini, K., Bond, F.: Putting Figures on Influences on Moroccan Darija from Arabic, French and Spanish using the WordNet. s.n., Singapore (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  • Outchakoucht, A., Es-samaali, H.: Moroccan Dialect-Darija-Open Dataset. Online, s.n. (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  • Piotr, B., PrzepiĂłrkowski, A.: TEI P5 as a Text Encoding Standard for Multilevel Corpus Annotation. Office for Humanities Communication and Centre for Computing, London (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  • Rosner, M., Ahmadi, S., Apostol, E.-S.: Cross-lingual link discovery for under-resourced languages. In: 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pp. 181–192. European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Marseille (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  • Tachicart, R., et al.: Towards automatic normalization of the Moroccan dialectal Arabic user generated text. In: Arabic Language Processing: From Theory to Practice, pp. 264–275. Springer, s.l. (2019)

    Chapter  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Tachicart, R., Bouzoubaa, K.: Moroccan Arabic vocabulary generation using a rule-based approach. J. King Saud Univ. Comput. Inf. Sci. (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  • Zarnoufi, R., Jaafar, H., Abik, M.: Machine normalization: bringing social media text from non-standard to standard form. ACM Trans. Asian Low-Resour. Lang. Inf. Process. 19(4), 1–30 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ridouane Tachicart .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2025 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Tachicart, R., Bouzaoubaa, K., Namly, D. (2025). Compiling a Bilingual Lexicon Using a Semi-automatic Approach. In: Hdioud, B., Aouragh, S.L. (eds) Arabic Language Processing: From Theory to Practice. ICALP 2024. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 2340. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-80438-0_8

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-80438-0_8

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-80437-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-80438-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics