Tharwa: A large scale dialectal Arabic - Standard Arabic - English lexicon

Mona Diab, Mohamed Al-Badrashiny, Maryam Aminian, Mohammed Attia, Pradeep Dasigi, Heba Elfardy, Ramy Eskander, Nizar Habash, Abdelati Hawwari, Wael Salloum

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

We introduce an electronic three-way lexicon, Tharwa, comprising Dialectal Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and English correspondents. The paper focuses on Egyptian Arabic as the first pilot dialect for the resource, with plans to expand to other dialects of Arabic in later phases of the project. We describe Tharwa's creation process and report on its current status. The lexical entries are augmented with various elements of linguistic information such as POS, gender, rationality, number, and root and pattern information. The lexicon is based on a compilation of information from both monolingual and bilingual existing resources such as paper dictionaries and electronic, corpus-based dictionaries. Multiple levels of quality checks are performed on the output of each step in the creation process. The importance of this lexicon lies in the fact that it is the first resource of its kind bridging multiple variants of Arabic with English. Furthermore, it is a wide coverage lexical resource containing over 73, 000 Egyptian entries. Tharwa is publicly available. We believe it will have a significant impact on both Theoretical Linguistics as well as Computational Linguistics research.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2014
EditorsNicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Sara Goggi, Thierry Declerck, Joseph Mariani, Bente Maegaard, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Helene Mazo, Stelios Piperidis, Hrafn Loftsson
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages3782-3789
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9782951740884
StatePublished - 2014
Event9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2014 - Reykjavik, Iceland
Duration: May 26 2014May 31 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2014

Other

Other9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2014
Country/TerritoryIceland
CityReykjavik
Period5/26/145/31/14

Keywords

  • Arabic dialects
  • Arabic lexicon
  • Arabic morphology
  • Egyptian Arabic dictionary

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Linguistics and Language
  • Library and Information Sciences
  • Education
  • Language and Linguistics

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