Introducing the Arabic WordNet project

Arabic is the official language of hundreds of millions of people in twenty Middle East and northern African countries, and is the religious language of all Muslims of various ethnicities around the world. Surprisingly little has been done in the field of computerised language and lexical resources. It is therefore motivating to develop an Arabic (WordNet) lexical resource that discovers the richness of Arabic as described in Elkateb (2005). This paper describes our approach towards building a lexical resource in Standard Arabic. Arabic WordNet (AWN) will be based on the design and contents of the universally accepted Princeton WordNet (PWN) and will be mappable straightforwardly onto PWN 2.0 and EuroWordNet (EWN), enabling translation on the lexical level to English and dozens of other languages. Several tools specific to this task will be developed. AWN will be a linguistic resource with a deep formal semantic foundation. Besides the standard wordnet representation of senses, word meanings are defined with a machine understandable semantics in first order logic. The basis for this semantics is the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) and its associated domain ontologies. We will greatly extend the ontology and its set of mappings to provide formal terms and definitions equivalent to each synset.

[1]  P.J.T.M. Vossen.  Introduction to the Special Issue on the BalkaNet Project , 2004 .

[2]  Adam Pease,et al.  Linking Lixicons and Ontologies: Mapping WordNet to the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology , 2003, IKE.

[3]  Nizar Habash,et al.  Arabic Tokenization, Part-of-Speech Tagging and Morphological Disambiguation in One Fell Swoop , 2005, ACL.

[4]  The Sigma Ontology Development Environment , 2003 .

[5]  Christiane Fellbaum,et al.  Book Reviews: WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database , 1999, CL.

[6]  Anne N. De Roeck,et al.  A Morphologically Sensitive Clustering Algorithm for Identifying Arabic Roots , 2000, ACL.

[7]  Steven G. Johnson,et al.  The Design and Implementation of FFTW3 , 2005, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[8]  Adam Pease,et al.  Towards a standard upper ontology , 2001, FOIS.

[9]  William J. Black,et al.  A Prototype English-Arabic Dictionary Based on WordNet , 2004 .

[10]  Mona T. Diab.  Feasibility of Bootstrapping an Arabic WordNet Leveraging Parallel Corpora and an English WordNet , 2022 .

[11]  Piek Vossen,et al.  EuroWordNet: A multilingual database with lexical semantic networks , 1998, Springer Netherlands.

[12]  Daniel Jurafsky,et al.  Automatic Tagging of Arabic Text: From Raw Text to Base Phrase Chunks , 2004, NAACL.

[13]  Julio Gonzalo,et al.  Towards a Universal Index of Meaning , 1999 .

[14]  Piek Vossen,et al.  EUROWORDNET: A MULTILINGUAL DATABASE OF AUTONOMOUS AND LANGUAGE-SPECIFIC WORDNETS CONNECTED VIA AN INTER-LINGUALINDEX , 2004, International Journal of Lexicography.