Alexander Magidow
2016
Shamela: A Large-Scale Historical Arabic Corpus
Yonatan Belinkov
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Alexander Magidow
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Maxim Romanov
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Avi Shmidman
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Moshe Koppel
Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Technology Resources and Tools for Digital Humanities (LT4DH)
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.
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