[Corpora-List] The release of the trail version of the International Corpus of Arabic (ICA)

[Sameh Alansary]

Dear Corpora List,

 I would like to announce the first phase of the trial release of the International Corpus of Arabic (ICA).  ICA attempts to build a representative corpus of the Arabic language as it is used all over the Arab world, with the aim of supporting research on linguistics in general and on Arabic computational linguistics in particular. The ICA is planned to contain 100 million words, the current situation demonstrates that almost 80% of the corpus is accomplished. ICA may represent a systematic investigation of national varieties within the Arabic speaking community as far as MSA is concerned. We hope that this should prove very useful for linguists who believe that their theories and descriptions of language should be based on real, rather than contrived, data.

In collecting ICA, the main focus was to cover the same genres from different sources and from all around the Arab world. Hence, the ICA covers numerous sources (Newspapers, web articles, books.. etc.) and numerous genres (Literature, Politics, Science Arts, Sports .. etc.).

Currently, this stage includes the morphological analysis of each word within the corpus, where the analysis lists number of information such as Prefix(s), Suffix(s), Word Class, Stem, Lemma, Root, Stem Pattern as well as Number, Gender and Definiteness according to the different contexts of the words within the corpus. All such information will be used in the search.

I would like to invite all of you who are interested, to use the corpus at www.bibalex.org/ica , and of course we welcome your comments for improvements to the corpus official email address ica at bibalex.org

Best Regards,
Sameh Alansary, Professor,
Arabic Computational Linguistic Center, Director,
Bibliotheca Alexandrina,
P.O.Box 138,
21526 El Shatby, Alexandria,
Tel: +20-3-4839999 Ext. 2788
Fax: +20-3-4820405
E-mail: sameh.alansary at bibalex.org   

 
 
 
 
 
  
 
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