Tharwa: A Large Scale Dialectal Arabic - Standard Arabic - English Lexicon

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


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.
Anthology ID:
L14-1115
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
3782–3789
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1161_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mona Diab, Mohamed Al-Badrashiny, Maryam Aminian, Mohammed Attia, Heba Elfardy, Nizar Habash, Abdelati Hawwari, Wael Salloum, Pradeep Dasigi, and Ramy Eskander. 2014. Tharwa: A Large Scale Dialectal Arabic - Standard Arabic - English Lexicon. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 3782–3789, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Tharwa: A Large Scale Dialectal Arabic - Standard Arabic - English Lexicon (Diab et al., LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1161_Paper.pdf