The analysis of a corpus of micro-blogs on the topic of the 2011 UK referendum about the Alternative Vote has been undertaken as a joint activity by text miners and social scientists. To facilitate the collaboration, the corpus and its analysis is managed in a Web-accessible framework that allows users to upload their own textual data for analysis and to manage their own text annotation resources used for analysis. The framework also allows annotations to be searched, and the analysis to be re-run after amending the analysis resources. The corpus is also doubly human-annotated stating both whether each tweet is overall positive or negative in sentiment and whether it is for or against the proposition of the referendum.

This paper introduces a recently initiated project that focuses on building a lexical resource for Modern Standard Arabic based on the widely used Princeton WordNet for English (Fellbaum, 1998). Our aim is to develop a linguistic resource with a deep formal semantic foundation in order to capture the richness of Arabic as described in Elkateb (2005). Arabic WordNet is being constructed following methods developed for EuroWordNet (Vossen, 1998). In addition to the standard wordnet representation of senses, word meanings are also being defined with a machine understandable semantics in first order logic. The basis for this semantics is the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology and its associated domain ontologies (Niles and Pease, 2001). We will greatly extend the ontology and its set of mappings to provide formal terms and definitions for each synset. Tools to be 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).

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.