1.5 billion words Arabic Corpus
This addresses the need for a large-scale, modern Arabic corpus for researchers and developers in natural language processing, though it is incremental as it focuses on data collection rather than new methods.
The researchers tackled the lack of a contemporary Arabic linguistic corpus by building a text corpus from over five million newspaper articles, resulting in a dataset containing over 1.5 billion words and about 3 million unique words.
This study is an attempt to build a contemporary linguistic corpus for Arabic language. The corpus produced, is a text corpus includes more than five million newspaper articles. It contains over a billion and a half words in total, out of which, there is about three million unique words. The data were collected from newspaper articles in ten major news sources from eight Arabic countries, over a period of fourteen years. The corpus was encoded with two types of encoding, namely: UTF-8, and Windows CP-1256. Also it was marked with two mark-up languages, namely: SGML, and XML.