An Arabic-Multilingual Database with a Lexicographic Search Engine

Abstract

We present a lexicographic search engine built on top of the largest Arabic multilingual database, allowing people to search and retrieve translations, synonyms, definitions, and more. The database currently contains about 150 Arabic multilingual lexicons that we have been digitizing, restructuring, and normalizing over 9 years. It comprises most types of lexical resources, such as modern and classical lexicons, thesauri, glossaries, lexicographic datasets, and (bi/)tri-lingual dictionaries. This is in addition to the Arabic Ontology – an Arabic WordNet with ontologically cleaned content, which is being used to reference and interlink lexical concepts. The search engine was developed with the state-of-the-art design features and according to the W3C’s recommendation and best practices for publishing data on the web, as well as the W3C’s Lemon RDF model. The search engine is publicly available at (https://ontology.birzeit.edu).