Building a WordNet for Arabic

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


Abstract
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).
Anthology ID:
L06-1504
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)
Month:
May
Year:
2006
Address:
Genoa, Italy
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Aldo Gangemi, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2006/pdf/805_pdf.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sabri Elkateb, William Black, Horacio Rodríguez, Musa Alkhalifa, Piek Vossen, Adam Pease, and Christiane Fellbaum. 2006. Building a WordNet for Arabic. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06), Genoa, Italy. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Building a WordNet for Arabic (Elkateb et al., LREC 2006)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2006/pdf/805_pdf.pdf