Construction and Annotation of the Jordan Comprehensive Contemporary Arabic Corpus (JCCA)

Majdi Sawalha, Faisal Alshargi, Abdallah AlShdaifat, Sane Yagi, Mohammad A. Qudah

Abstract
To compile a modern dictionary that catalogues the words in currency, and to study linguistic patterns in the contemporary language, it is necessary to have a corpus of authentic texts that reflect current usage of the language. Although there are numerous Arabic corpora, none claims to be representative of the language in terms of the combination of geographical region, genre, subject matter, mode, and medium. This paper describes a 100-million-word corpus that takes the British National Corpus (BNC) as a model. The aim of the corpus is to be balanced, annotated, comprehensive, and representative of contemporary Arabic as written and spoken in Arab countries today. It will be different from most others in not being heavily-dominated by the news or in mixing the classical with the modern. In this paper is an outline of the methodology adopted for the design, construction, and annotation of this corpus. DIWAN (Alshargi and Rambow, 2015) was used to annotate a one-million-word snapshot of the corpus. DIWAN is a dialectal word annotation tool, but we upgraded it by adding a new tag-set that is based on traditional Arabic grammar and by adding the roots and morphological patterns of nouns and verbs. Moreover, the corpus we constructed covers the major spoken varieties of Arabic.
Anthology ID:
W19-4616
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Venue:
WANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
148–157
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-4616
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-4616
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Majdi Sawalha, Faisal Alshargi, Abdallah AlShdaifat, Sane Yagi, and Mohammad A. Qudah. 2019. Construction and Annotation of the Jordan Comprehensive Contemporary Arabic Corpus (JCCA). In Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, pages 148–157, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Construction and Annotation of the Jordan Comprehensive Contemporary Arabic Corpus (JCCA) (Sawalha et al., WANLP 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/W19-4616.pdf
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