Shamela: A Large-Scale Historical Arabic Corpus
Computation and Language
2016-12-30 v1
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1612.08989,
title = {Shamela: A Large-Scale Historical Arabic Corpus},
author = {Yonatan Belinkov and Alexander Magidow and Maxim Romanov and Avi Shmidman and Moshe Koppel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.08989},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
Slightly expanded version of Coling LT4DH workshop paper