BAAC: Bangor arabic annotated corpus

Abstract

This paper describes the creation of the new Bangor Arabic Annotated Corpus (BAAC) which is a Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) corpus that comprises 50K words manually annotated by parts-of-speech. For evaluating the quality of the corpus, the Kappa coefficient and a direct percent agreement for each tag were calculated for the new corpus and a Kappa value of 0.956 was obtained, with an average observed agreement of 94.25%. The corpus was used to evaluate the widely used Madamira Arabic part-of-speech tagger and to further investigate compression models for text compressed using part-of-speech tags. Also, a new annotation tool was developed and employed for the annotation process of BAAC.