Making Do With arabiCorpus: Getting Past English Corpus Envy ... / Presented by: Dilworth Parkinson
Channel: COERLL
Date: 2016-04-18

This presentation will begin by detailing the features of Arabic that make what might be called normal corpus manipulation problematic. It will then review ongoing attempts to resolve these problems (i.e. to provide Arabic corpora that can “do what English corpora can do”). A case will then be made for the need for a very large, non-lemmatized corpus of Arabic until such time as the massive resources needed to create a large lemmatized corpus become available in a non-politicized/non-ideological manner. arabiCorpus.byu.edu is one attempt to provide this clearly less than adequate, temporary solution.

An overview of arabiCorpus will be given that will highlight both what it does well and what it does poorly. The nuts and bolts behind the ‘magic’ will be explained, and then several case studies will be examined which will demonstrate that although this corpus clearly cannot ‘do’ what English corpora routinely do, creative solutions exist that allow one in many cases to approximate those results, and which provide data for uses in lexicography, Arabic language teaching and Arabic Linguistics that would have been difficult or impossible to obtain before the availability of such online corpora.