LAMP: A Multimodal Web Platform for Collaborative Linguistic Analysis

This paper describes the underlying software platform used to develop and publish annotations for the Quranic Arabic Corpus (QAC). The QAC (Dukes, Atwell and Habash, 2011) is a multimodal language resource that integrates deep tagging, interlinear translation, multiple speech recordings, visualization and collaborative analysis for the Classical Arabic language of the Quran. Available online at http://corpus.quran.com, the website is a popular study guide for Quranic Arabic, used by over 1.2 million visitors over the past year. We provide a description of the underlying software system that has been used to develop the corpus annotations. The multimodal data is made available online through an accessible cross-referenced web interface. Although our Linguistic Analysis Multimodal Platform (LAMP), has been applied to the Classical Arabic language of the Quran, we argue that our annotation model and software architecture may be of interest to other related corpus linguistics projects. Work related to LAMP includes recent efforts for annotating other Classical languages, such as Ancient Greek and Latin (Bamman, Mambrini and Crane, 2009), as well as commercial systems (e.g. Logos Bible study) that provide access to syntactic tagging for the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament (Brannan, 2011).