A Pilot PropBank Annotation for Quranic Arabic

The Quran is a significant religious text written in a unique literary style, close to very poetic language in nature. Accordingly it is significantly richer and more complex than the newswire style used in the previously released Arabic PropBank (Zaghouani et al., 2010; Diab et al., 2008). We present preliminary work on the creation of a unique Arabic proposition repository for Quranic Arabic. We annotate the semantic roles for the 50 most frequent verbs in the Quranic Arabic Dependency Treebank (QATB) (Dukes and Buckwalter 2010). The Quranic Arabic PropBank (QAPB) will be a unique new resource of its kind for the Arabic NLP research community as it will allow for interesting insights into the semantic use of classical Arabic, poetic literary Arabic, as well as significant religious texts. Moreover, on a pragmatic level QAPB will add approximately 810 new verbs to the existing Arabic PropBank (APB). In this pilot experiment, we leverage our knowledge and experience from our involvement in the APB project. All the QAPB annotations will be made freely available for research purposes.