An Online Arabic Dictionary Makes Its Debut
A computer science professor at Birzeit University has built an online tool called Arabic Ontology that is both a comprehensive dictionary of Arabic and a system that will enable the creation of new Arabic-language software, such as better machine translation.
Mustafa Jarrar, an associate professor in the department of computer science at Birzeit, in the West Bank, has worked for eight years to create the new tool. It functions not only as a searchable lexicon of Arabic that can be used as both a dictionary and a thesaurus, but also as a logical system—an ontology—that recognizes the unique characteristics of the Arabic language. It can find relationships between the meanings of Arabic words in a natively Arabic way for the first [...]