Workshop on Arabic Corpus Linguistics

Lancaster University, 11th-12th April 2011

Over the past few years, research into the Arabic language using corpora and corpus methods has moved from a new direction to an active field, with work advancing rapidly on many different fronts of both corpus linguistics and computational linguistics. In April 2011, UCREL hosted a Workshop on Arabic Corpus Linguistics, to create a venue where these different directions on corpus research into Arabic could be brought together to explore progress in the field.

The scope of the workshop encompassed both (a) the design, construction and annotation of Arabic corpora, and (b) the use of corpora in research on the Arabic language - in areas including lexis and lexicography, syntax, collocation, NLP systems and analysis tools, stylistics, and discourse analysis.

The keynote speakers were Tony McEnery (Lancaster University) and Eric Atwell (University of Leeds).

This website serves as a static record of the workshop and an archive for the materials that were presented. Linked from here, you will find:

• The programme for the WACL;
   
• The book of abstracts (440Kb);
   
• PDF copies of slides kindly provided by participants (see list below).
   
• A short directory of links to easily-available and/or widely-used Arabic corpora and other resources discussed at the WACL.
   

Useful links to Arabic corpora and other resources

Corpora

• The arabiCorpus.byu.edu corpus and analysis system by Dilworth Parkinson
   
• The Leeds Corpus of Contemporary Arabic; compiled by Latifa Al-Sulaiti and freely downloadable
   
• The open interface to a set of different Arabic corpora, developed by Serge Sharoff (see also the Arabic internet corpus)
   
• The Qur’anic Arabic Corpus, openly accessible and with extremely detailed annotation
  
• The Tunisian Arabic Corpus compiled by Karen McNeil and Miled Faiza
   
• UCREL's CQPweb system contains various Arabic datasets, including the 1001 Nights and the Qur'an; contact Andrew Hardie for a user account
   
• Oxford Arabic Corpus - see Whitelock & Arts presentation, below
   
• The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) distributes the Arabic Gigaword and the Arabic Treebank
   
• Latifa Al-Sulaiti's directory of Arabic corpora.
   

Other tools and resources

• Links to further resources from the Arabic Language Computing Research team at the University of Leeds
   
• The Buckwalter Morphological Analyser (see also the relevant catalogue entry at the LDC)
   
• The MADA disambiguation system from the CADIM group
   

Presenters and Slides

Please note, many of the presentations are very large files (several megabytes in PDF in some cases). Our thanks go to the participants for allowing their slides to be made available to the research community at large.

• Aspects of the lexical and grammatical behaviour of Arabic idioms
  Ashraf Abdou
  [no slides available]
   
• Multifactorial methods for exploring contextual factors in the usage of Modern Standard Arabic COME verbs
  Dana Abdulrahim, John Newman and Sally Rice
  [slides]
   
• Combining corpus-based and linguistic models for Arabic speech systems
  Hanady Ahmed and Allan Ramsay
  [slides]
   
• The Leeds Arabic Discourse Treebank: Guidelines for annotating discourse connectives and relations
  Amal Al-Saif and Katja Markert
  [slides]
   
• Using the Web to model Modern and Quranic Arabic
  Eric Atwell
  [slides]
   
• Corpus analysis of conjunctions: Arabic learners’ difficulties with collocations
  Haslina Hassan and Nuraihan Mat Daud
  [slides]
   
• Compiling a modern corpus-based collocation dictionary of Arabic
  Sattar Izwaini
  [slides]
   
• A new opportunity: Arabic Corpus Linguistics
  Tony McEnery
  [no slides available]
   
• Tunisian Arabic Corpus: Creating a written corpus of an “unwritten” language
  Karen McNeil and Miled Faiza
  [slides]
   
• The dual tagging approach of the Modern Arabic Representative Corpus 2000 (MARC-2000)
  Marc Van Mol
  [no slides available]
   
• Underneath the hood of arabiCorpus.byu.edu
  Dilworth B. Parkinson
  [slides] (warning: 38Mb)
   
• Getting flexible: Developing a corpus of Iraqi Arabic to study multimodal communication
  Kamala Russell, Atoor Lawandow, Amy Dix, Edward King, Frederica Lipmann, Daniel Parvaz, Gina-Anne Levow, Dan Loehr
  [no slides available]
   
• Collocational patterns in a corpus of Modern Standard Arabic
  Safwat Ali Saleh
  [no slides available]
   
• For a relational approach to modern literary Arabic conditional clauses
  Manuel Sartori
  [no slides available]
   
• Corpus linguistics resource and tools for Arabic lexicography
  Majdi Sawalha and Eric Atwell
  [slides]
   
• Oxford Arabic Corpus
  Pete Whitelock and Tressy Arts
  [slides]
   
• Semantic prosody as a tool for translating prepositions in the Holy Qur’an: A corpus-based analysis
  Nagwa Younis
  [no slides available]
   
• Arabic plurals in context: a corpus study
  Petr Zemánek and Jirí Milicka
  [no slides available]