An Online Readability Leveled A rabic Thesaurus (2020)

Abstract: This demo paper introduces the online Readability Leveled Arabic Thesaurus interface. For a given user input word, this interface provides the word’s possible lemmas, roots, English glosses, related Arabic words and phrases, and readability on a five-level readability scale. This interface builds on and connects multiple existing Arabic resources and processing tools. This one-of-a-kind system enables Arabic speakers and learners to benefit from advances in Arabic computational linguistics technologies. Feedback from users of the system will help the developers to identify lexical coverage gaps and errors. A live link to the demo is available at: http://samer.camel-lab.com/ .

## introduction arabic is one of the six un official languages, the language of millions of people in the arab world, as well as the liturgy language of muslims. it is also a language known for its difficulty for new learners; and its modern standard arabic (msa) form used in education and the media is technically not the native form spoken by modern-day arabs, who speak a variety of its dialects. as such, there is a great need to have user-friendly interfaces for searching on arabic words and their relations targeting arabic teachers and learners. however, a small minority of dictionaries in general (and none in arabic to our knowledge) specify the readability level of their words, let alone their lexical relations with other words. the system we present in this paper exploits a number of developments in arabic natural language processing (nlp) by different groups of researchers @xcite @xcite @xcite to develop a new online thesaurus that (a) supports different search modes (inflected word, lemma, root and english gloss), (b) provides five types of lexical relations (synonyms, antonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms and related), and (c) indicates the readability level of the word on a five-scale system. this interface allows arabic speakers and learners to benefit from advances in arabic nlp technologies. and by exposing these technologies to a large number of users, we expect their feedback will help the researchers who developed the computational and lexical components to identify gaps and errors. a live link to the demo is available at: http://samer.camel-lab.com/ . ## background and related work in this section, we present the main challenges for processing arabic, and the various databases and nlp tools we use in developing our system. arabic linguistic considerations arabic is a morphologically rich and orthographically ambiguous language. words have many inflected forms varying in terms of gender, number, person, case, aspect, mood, voice, as well as a large number of attachable clitics, such as pronominal objects and prepositions. short vowels and consonant doubling are indicated using optional diacritical marks that are mostly elided resulting in a high degree of ambiguity. for example the word frdha has four core lemmas (or lexical abstractions over all inflections): the verbs far∼ad 'individualize, separate in units', and rad∼ 'answer, return'; and the nouns fard 'individual, unit' and rad∼ 'response, return'. 1 the root of the first and third lemmas is ## design and implementation we start with a discussion of the design desiderata of our system, followed by details of the database preparation, back-end functionalities and front-end interface. ## conclusion and future work we presented an online readability leveled arabic thesaurus, created through integrating a number of arabic nlp tools and data sets. we plan to continue improving on the various elements used in building this interface. the most immediate use of the interface is as part of an effort to simplify arabic modern novels to younger readers @xcite .