Shamela: A Large-Scale Historical Arabic Corpus

Yonatan Belinkov, Alexander Magidow, Maxim Romanov, Avi Shmidman, Moshe Koppel


Abstract
Arabic is a widely-spoken language with a rich and long history spanning more than fourteen centuries. Yet existing Arabic corpora largely focus on the modern period or lack sufficient diachronic information. We develop a large-scale, historical corpus of Arabic of about 1 billion words from diverse periods of time. We clean this corpus, process it with a morphological analyzer, and enhance it by detecting parallel passages and automatically dating undated texts. We demonstrate its utility with selected case-studies in which we show its application to the digital humanities.
Anthology ID:
W16-4007
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Technology Resources and Tools for Digital Humanities (LT4DH)
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Erhard Hinrichs, Marie Hinrichs, Thorsten Trippel
Venue:
LT4DH
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
45–53
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-4007
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yonatan Belinkov, Alexander Magidow, Maxim Romanov, Avi Shmidman, and Moshe Koppel. 2016. Shamela: A Large-Scale Historical Arabic Corpus. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Technology Resources and Tools for Digital Humanities (LT4DH), pages 45–53, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Shamela: A Large-Scale Historical Arabic Corpus (Belinkov et al., LT4DH 2016)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/W16-4007.pdf