Compilation of an Arabic Children’s Corpus

Compilation of an Arabic Children’s Corpus Latifa Al-Sulaiti, Noorhan Abbas, Claire Brierley, Eric Atwell, Ayman Alghamdi University of Leeds School of Computing, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK E-mail: lsulaiti9@hotmail.com, noorhanabbas@yahoo.co.uk, C.Brierley@leeds.ac.uk, E.S.Atwell@leeds.ac.uk , scaaa@leeds.ac.uk Abstract Inspired by the Oxford Children's Corpus, we have developed a prototype corpus of Arabic texts written and/or selected for children. Our Arabic Children's Corpus of 2950 documents and nearly 2 million words has been collected manually from the web during a 3- month project. It is of high quality, and contains a range of different children's genres based on sources located, including classic tales from The Arabian Nights, and popular fictional characters such as Goha. We anticipate that the current and subsequent versions of our corpus will lead to interesting studies in text classification, language use, and ideology in children's texts. Keywords: Arabic, Children's Corpus, Genre Classification 1. Introduction When the Oxford Children's Corpus (OCC) was published in 2012, it was heralded as the first of its kind (Wild, Kilgarriff and Tugwell 2012). The preferred definition of children's literature adopted for that corpus is material written especially for children, and/or selected for children by parents, teachers, and publishers. Version 1.0 of the OCC contains some 30 million tokens of English text for 5-14 year olds, organised into four basic genres (fiction; non-fiction; children's own writing; and unclassified), and with an emphasis on 21st-century material (ibid). Children's corpora as defined above appear to be few and far between. A small corpus of children's texts for English (less than 1 million words) was extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC) by Thompson and Sealey (2007) for corpus-based insight into the distinguishing features of children's versus adult fiction. There is also a children's literature section in the Corpus of Translated Finnish (Mauranen 2000), where the main source languages are English and Russian; this has been used in studies of translationese in Finnish children's texts (Puurtinen 2003; 1998). Finally, children's fiction is included in the parallel Bulgarian-Polish Corpus (Dimitrova and Koseska-Toszewa 2009). Rather like the OCC for English, the Arabic Children's Corpus (ACC) introduced in this paper is a first for the Arabic language. Surveys of Arabic children's literature do exist. Perhaps the most comprehensive is Al-Hajji's Bibliographical Guide (1990), which covers an estimated 12,000 books published for children across the Arab region between 1950-1999 (Mdallel 2003). Al-Hazza (2006) offers an update on new and selected publications which genuinely reflect contemporary Arab culture; and Peterson (2005) offers an intriguing survey of Arabic children's magazines, most notably: Majid; Alaa Eldin; Al-Arabi Alsaghir; and Bolbol. Compilation (and later annotation) of the ACC is an ongoing project. However, version 1.0 of the corpus, with some 1,877,615 word tokens, and drawn exclusively from the Internet, already attempts to classify a wider range of children's genres than any of the above datasets. 2. Why Collect a Corpus of Children's Literature? The OCC was primarily compiled for the purposes of lexicography, to inform children's dictionaries at Oxford University Press (OUP). A large corpus was …

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