Al Qamus al Muhit, a Medieval Arabic Lexicon in LMF

Al Qamus al Muhit, a Medieval Arabic Lexicon in LMF Ouafae Nahli, Francesca Frontini, Monica Monachini Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “A. Zampolli”, CNR, Pisa ouafae.nahli@ilc.cnr.it, francesca.frontini@ilc.cnr.it, monica.monachini@ilc.cnr.it Fahad Khan Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Universit`a di Ca’ Foscari, Venezia Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “A. Zampolli”, CNR, Pisa fahad.khan@unive.it, fahad.khan@ilc.cnr.it Arsalane Zarghili, Mustapha Khalfi Facult´e des Sciences et Techniques, Universit´e Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah, Fez zargili@gmail.com, mus.khalfi@gmail.com Abstract This paper describes the conversion into LMF, a standard lexicographic digital format of ’al-q¯am¯us al-muh. ¯it., a Medieval Arabic lexicon. The lexicon is first described, then all the steps required for the conversion are illustrated. The work is will produce a useful lexicographic resource for Arabic NLP, but is also interesting per se, to study the implications of adapting the LMF model to the Arabic language. Some reflections are offered as to the status of roots with respect to previously suggested representations. In particular, roots are, in our opinion are to be not treated as lexical entries, but modeled as lexical metadata for classifying and identifying lexical entries. In this manner, each root connects all entries that are derived from it. Keywords: Arabic Lexicon, LMF, Al Qamus al Muhit 1. Introduction In this article we will describe ongoing work in the con- version of a medieval Arabic lexicon ’al-q¯am¯us al-muh. ¯it. into the XML format using the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF). Our overall aim is to make this historically impor- tant lexicographic work available in a format that renders the lexical information contained within it more easily ac- cessible and especially by NLP applications. The utility of LMF in this case is that it provides a standardized frame- work for modeling and representing NLP lexicons as has been well demonstrated in several previous projects (Fran- copoulo 2013). In the next section we will discuss the different challenges that arise due to the structure of the Arabic language itself and which it is necessary to take into consideration when processing Arabic lexicons which are generally structured quite differently from lexicons for European languages like English or Italian. We will briefly detail some background on the ’al-q¯am¯us al-muh. ¯it. lexicon itself and outline the par- ticular mode of organisation used in that work. We will also describe previous work that has been carried out in devel- oping Arabic language lexica using the LMF format. In the following section we will present the process by which the original text file used as a source for the lexicon was processed and segmented to extract structured information from the original entries and definitions, and how this in- formation was then represented in LMF compliant entries. In doing so, we shall briefly address some open issues with respect to the correct representation of Arabic roots as well as looking forward to our plans for future work. 2. Background Words in Arabic as in other Semitic languages like Hebrew and Aramaic, are formed in a systematic way on the basis of consonantal roots. This systematicity in word forma- tion gives us …

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