Al —Khalil : The Arabic Linguistic Ontology Project

AbstractDespite Arabic is the language of hundred millions of people over the world, little has been done in terms of computerized linguistic resources, tools or applications. In this paper we describe a project which aim is to contribute filling this gap. The project consists in building an ontology centered infrastructure for Arabic Language resources and applications. The core of this infrastructure is a linguistic ontology that is founded on Arabic Traditional Grammar. The methodology we have chosen consists in reusing an existing ontology, namely the Gold linguistic ontology. GOLD is the first ontology being designed for linguistic description on the semantic web. We first construct our ontology manually by relating our concepts from Arabic Linguistics to the upper concepts of GOLD, furthermore an information extraction algorithm is implemented to automatically enrich the ontology. We discuss the development of the ontology and present our vision for the whole project which aims at using this ontology for creating tools and resources for both linguists and NLP Researchers. Indeed, the ontology is seen , not only as a domain ontology but also as a resource for different linguistic and NLP applications.