A Lexical Database for Modern Standard Arabic Interoperable with a Finite State Morphological Transducer

Current Arabic lexicons, whether computational or otherwise, make no distinction between entries from Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Classical Arabic (CA), and tend to include obsolete words that are not attested in current usage. We address this problem by building a large-scale, corpus-based lexical database that is representative of MSA. We use an MSA corpus of 1,089,111,204 words, a pre-annotation tool, machine learning techniques, and knowledge-based templatic matching to automatically acquire and filter lexical knowledge about morpho-syntactic attributes and inflection paradigms. Our lexical database is scalable, interoperable and suitable for constructing a morphological analyser, regardless of the design approach and programming language used. The database is formatted according to the international ISO standard in lexical resource representation, the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF). This lexical database is used in developing an open-source finite-state morphological processing toolkit.1 We build a web application, AraComLex (Arabic Computer Lexicon),2 for managing and curating the lexical database.