Arabic WordNet and the Challenges of Arabic

Sabri Elkateb, William Black, Piek Vossen, David Farwell, Horacio Rodríguez, Adam Pease, Musa Alkhalifa, Christiane Fellbaum


Abstract
Arabic WordNet is a lexical resource for Modern Standard Arabic based on the widely used Princeton WordNet for English (Fellbaum, 1998). Arabic WordNet (AWN) is 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. We have developed and linked the AWN with the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO), where concepts are defined with machine interpretable semantics in first order logic (Niles and Pease, 2001). We have greatly extended the ontology and its set of mappings to provide formal terms and definitions for each synset. The end product would be a linguistic resource with a deep formal semantic foundation that is able to capture the richness of Arabic as described in Elkateb (2005). Tools we have developed as part of this effort include a lexicographer's interface modeled on that used for EuroWordNet, with added facilities for Arabic script, following Black and Elkateb's earlier work (2004). In this paper we describe our methodology for building a lexical resource in Arabic and the challenge of Arabic for lexical resources.
Anthology ID:
2006.bcs-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the International Conference on the Challenge of Arabic for NLP/MT
Month:
October 23
Year:
2006
Address:
London, UK
Venue:
BCS
SIG:
Publisher:
Note:
Pages:
15–24
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2006.bcs-1.2
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Sabri Elkateb, William Black, Piek Vossen, David Farwell, Horacio Rodríguez, Adam Pease, Musa Alkhalifa, and Christiane Fellbaum. 2006. Arabic WordNet and the Challenges of Arabic. In Proceedings of the International Conference on the Challenge of Arabic for NLP/MT, pages 15–24, London, UK.
Cite (Informal):
Arabic WordNet and the Challenges of Arabic (Elkateb et al., BCS 2006)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2006.bcs-1.2.pdf