# The Saudi Novel Corpus: Design and Compilation
## 2 Background and Related Works
### Arabic Corpora
Examples of these corpora include the Quranic Arabic Corpus (available via: [[https://corpus.quran.com/](https://corpus.quran.com/)]([https://corpus.quran.com/](https://corpus.quran.com/)), accessed on 12 April 2022), KACST Error Corrected Corpus (available via: [[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6193415](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6193415)]([https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6193415](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6193415)), accessed on 12 April 2022), Arabic Learner Corpus (available via: [[https://www.arabiclearnercorpus.com/](https://www.arabiclearnercorpus.com/)]([https://www.arabiclearnercorpus.com/](https://www.arabiclearnercorpus.com/)), accessed on 12 April 2022), Tunisian Arabic Corpus (available via: [[http://www.tunisiya.org/](http://www.tunisiya.org/)]([http://www.tunisiya.org/](http://www.tunisiya.org/)), accessed on 12 April 2022), Curras (a corpus of Palestinian dialect, available via: [[https://portal.sina.birzeit.edu/curras/](https://portal.sina.birzeit.edu/curras/)]([https://portal.sina.birzeit.edu/curras/](https://portal.sina.birzeit.edu/curras/)), accessed on 12 April 2022), SUAR (a corpus of Saudi dialect, available via: [[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187705091832163X](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187705091832163X)]([https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187705091832163X](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187705091832163X)), accessed on 12 April 2022), and AraSenCorpus (a corpus of Arabic tweets, available via: [[https://github.com/yemen2016/AraSenCorpus](https://github.com/yemen2016/AraSenCorpus)]([https://github.com/yemen2016/AraSenCorpus](https://github.com/yemen2016/AraSenCorpus)), accessed on 12 April 2022). More details about these corpora and others are reported in [35; 36; 37]. Likewise, several general corpora of Arabic, which contain a variety of text types and genres and are built for a number of purposes, ignore Arabic (including Saudi) novels altogether, and exclude them from their data. Examples of these corpora are the Corpus of Contemporary Arabic [35] (The developer of this corpus states that the corpus contains around 21,958 words from short stories. This genre, however, is regarded as different from novels. ), Open Source Arabic Corpus [38], KALIMAT [39] and arTenTen [40], and KACST Text Classification Corpus [41]. On the other hand, several general Arabic corpora do include novels in their data (e.g., the International Arabic Corpus (ICA, available via: [[http://www.bibalex.org/ica/en/About.aspx](http://www.bibalex.org/ica/en/About.aspx)]([http://www.bibalex.org/ica/en/About.aspx](http://www.bibalex.org/ica/en/About.aspx)), accessed on 12 April 2022), ArabiCorpus (available via: [[https://arabicorpus.byu.edu/search.php](https://arabicorpus.byu.edu/search.php)]([https://arabicorpus.byu.edu/search.php](https://arabicorpus.byu.edu/search.php)), accessed on 12 April 2022), and the corpus of King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST, available via: [[https://corpus.kacst.edu.sa](https://corpus.kacst.edu.sa)]([https://corpus.kacst.edu.sa](https://corpus.kacst.edu.sa)), accessed on 12 April 2022). However, a closer examination of such corpora reveals multiple limitations, summarized in the following points:  
1. Most of the Arabic general corpora do not provide details about the regional information of the included novels. In other words, they do not explicitly indicate the geographical distributions of the data for each genre and subgenre represented. Thus, these corpora may or may not contain texts from Saudi novels since their users are not able to discern from which Arab countries the data originate. As a result, it is impossible to rely on these corpora to conduct a corpus study of Saudi novels. This limitation is true of the Corpus Linguae Arabicae [42], ICA [43], NEMLAR Written Corpus [44], and Jordon Comprehensive Contemporary Arabic Corpus [45]. 2.