Critical Survey of the Freely Available Arabic Corpora

TL;DR

This paper surveys and compiles a comprehensive, updated list of 66 freely available Arabic corpora and resources, facilitating NLP research for Arabic language processing.

Contribution

It provides the first extensive, categorized, and accessible compilation of free Arabic corpora with direct links, addressing a significant resource gap.

Findings

Identified 66 free Arabic corpora sources

Categorized resources for easier access

Provided direct download links where available

Abstract

The availability of corpora is a major factor in building natural language processing applications. However, the costs of acquiring corpora can prevent some researchers from going further in their endeavours. The ease of access to freely available corpora is urgent needed in the NLP research community especially for language such as Arabic. Currently, there is not easy was to access to a comprehensive and updated list of freely available Arabic corpora. We present in this paper, the results of a recent survey conducted to identify the list of the freely available Arabic corpora and language resources. Our preliminary results showed an initial list of 66 sources. We presents our findings in the various categories studied and we provided the direct links to get the data when possible.