AraConc, an Arabic Concordance Software Based on the DIINAR.1 Language Resource

This paper presents the reader with the AraConc, software, which has been devised to extract concordances and frequency lists in Arabic by R. Abbes within the SILAT research team. (The SILAT group, ‘Systemes d’information, Ingenierie et Linguistique Arabe, Terminologie’, is included in the ICAR Lab, CNRS/Universite Lumiere-Lyon 2 and ENS-LSH.). AraConc is one of the analyzers based on the DIINAR.1 knowledge database (DIctionnaire INformatise de l’ARabe, version 1). First, the authors introduce the functions included in the software, which are based on the specific structures of Arabic texts (many of which are shared by Semitic languages of the same group). Second, they deal with the difficulties encountered in the pretreatment of texts, i.e.: the fact that usual Arabic script is ‘unvowelled’, the agglutinative structure of Arabic wordforms and the various morphological variations encountered. Third, they show the inadequacy of surface search techniques, and the subsequent interest of a farfetching morpho-syntactic analysis centred on the specific structures of the language, when it comes to the building of a real and thorough concordance software. Examples of how AraConc operates will also be given.

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