Maknuune: A Large Open Palestinian A rabic Lexicon (2022)

Abstract: We present Maknuune, a large open lexicon for the Palestinian Arabic dialect. Maknuune has over 36K entries from 17K lemmas, and 3.7K roots. All entries include diacritized Arabic orthography, phonological transcription and English glosses. Some entries are enriched with additional information such as broken plurals and templatic feminine forms, associated phrases and collocations, Standard Arabic glosses, and examples or notes on grammar, usage, or location of collected entry

## introduction arabic is a collective of historically related variants that co-exist in a diglossic @xcite relationship between a standard variant and geographically specific dialectal variants. standard arabic @xcite ) is typically used to refer to the older classical arabic (ca) used in quranic texts and pre-islamic poetry, all the way to modern sa (msa), the official language of news and culture in the arab world. dialectal arabic (da) is classified geographically into regions such as egyptian, levantine, maghrebi, and gulf. the dialects, which differ among themselves and sa, are the primary mode of spoken communication, although increasingly they are dominating in written form on social media. that said, da has no official prescriptive grammars or orthographic standards, unlike the highly standardized and regulated msa. in the realm of natural language processing (nlp), msa has relatively more annotated and parallel resources than da; although there are many notable efforts to fill gaps in all arabic variants @xcite . in this paper, we focus on palestinian arabic (pal), which is part of the south levantine arabic dialect subgroup. pal consists of several subdialects in the region of historic palestine that vary in terms of their phonology and lexical choice @xcite . pal, like all other da, has been historically influenced by many languages, specifically, in its case, syriac, turkish, persian, english and most recently modern hebrew @xcite , as well as other arabic dialects that came in interaction with pal after the nakba. while this research effort was originally motivated by the need to document and preserve the cultural heritage and unique identities of the various pal sub-dialects, it has expanded to cover pal's ever-evolving nature as a living language, and provides a resource to support research and development in arabic dialect nlp. concretely, we present maknuune , 1 a large open lexicon for pal, with over 36k entries from 17k lemmas, and 3.7k roots. 2 all entries include diacritized arabic orthography and phonological transcription following @xcite , as well as english glosses. important inflectional variants are included for some lemmas, such as broken plural and templatic feminine. about 10% of the entries are phrases (multiword expressions) indexed by their primary lemmas. and about 67% of the entries include msa glosses, examples, and/or notes on grammar, usage, or location of collected entry. to our knowledge, maknuune is the largest open machine-readable dictionary for pal. maknuune is publicly viewable and downloadable. 3 we discuss some related work in section 2, and highlight some pal linguistic facts that motivated many of our design choices in section 3. section 4 presents our data collection process and annotation guidelines. we present statistics for our lexicon and evaluate its coverage in section 5. 1 /maknūne/ is a pal farming term that refers to an egg intentionally left behind in a specific location to encourage the chicken to lay more eggs in that location. we hope that the lexicon will encourage other researchers and citizen linguists to contribute to it. ## related work linguistic descriptions there are several linguistic references describing various aspects of pal @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite . these are mostly targeting academics and language learners. we consulted many of these resources as part of developing our annotation guidelines. ## linguistic facts in this section we present some general linguistic facts about pal and highlight specific challenging phenomena that motivated many of our annotation decisions. ## methodology in this section, we discuss the methodology we adopted in data collection for maknuune, as well as the guidelines we followed for creating the lexicon entries. ## coverage evaluation we approximate the coverage of our lexicon by comparing it with the curras corpus @xcite , the largest resource available for pal. 9 since curras is a corpus and our resource is a lexicon, the analysis is carried out in such a way to account for that difference. we present next some pos type unique lemma:pos entries forms phrases nominals verbs other proper & foreign total 17,369 36,302 32,759 3,543 10,871 16,258 13,449 2,809 6,179 19,622 18,982 640 254 324 263 61 65 98 65 33 ## conclusion and future work we presented maknuune, a large open lexicon for the palestinian arabic dialect. maknuune has over 36k entries from 17k lemmas, and 3.7k roots. all entries include arabic diacritized orthography, phonological transcription and english glosses. some entries are enriched with additional information such as broken plural and templatic feminine forms, associated phrases and collocations, standard arabic glosses, and examples or notes on grammar, usage, or location of collected entry. in the future, we plan to continue to expand maknuune to cover more pal sub-dialects, more entries, and richer annotations, in particular for locations of usage, and morpholexical features such as rationality. we hope that by making it public, more researchers and citizen linguists will help enrich it and correct anything missing in it. we also plan to make use of maknuune as part of the development of larger resources and tools for arabic nlp. the phonological transcriptions can be helpful for work in speech recognition and the morphological information for developing morphological analyzers and pos taggers. furthermore, we plan to utilize maknuune to develop pedagogical applications to help teach pal to non-arabic speakers and to children of palestinians in the diaspora.