The Arabic Ontology -- An Arabic Wordnet with Ontologically Clean Content
This work addresses the need for an ontologically clean Arabic wordnet for researchers and practitioners in natural language processing and linguistics, representing an incremental improvement by building on existing resources like Princeton WordNet and Wikidata.
The authors tackled the problem of creating a formal Arabic wordnet by developing the Arabic Ontology, which provides a formal representation of concepts based on ontological analysis and rigorous knowledge sources, resulting in a resource that can top the majority of Arabic meanings with about 1,300 well-investigated concepts and 11,000 partially validated concepts.
We present a formal Arabic wordnet built on the basis of a carefully designed ontology hereby referred to as the Arabic Ontology. The ontology provides a formal representation of the concepts that the Arabic terms convey, and its content was built with ontological analysis in mind, and benchmarked to scientific advances and rigorous knowledge sources as much as this is possible, rather than to only speakers' beliefs as lexicons typically are. A comprehensive evaluation was conducted thereby demonstrating that the current version of the top-levels of the ontology can top the majority of the Arabic meanings. The ontology consists currently of about 1,300 well-investigated concepts in addition to 11,000 concepts that are partially validated. The ontology is accessible and searchable through a lexicographic search engine (https://ontology.birzeit.edu) that also includes about 150 Arabic-multilingual lexicons, and which are being mapped and enriched using the ontology. The ontology is fully mapped with Princeton WordNet, Wikidata, and other resources.