The Arabic Ontology -- An Arabic Wordnet with Ontologically Clean Content

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal Arabic WordNet based on a carefully designed ontology that emphasizes ontological rigor and scientific validation, providing a comprehensive, accessible resource for Arabic language concepts.

Contribution

It presents the development of an ontologically clean Arabic WordNet with rigorous validation, extensive mapping to other lexical resources, and a publicly accessible search engine.

Findings

The ontology covers about 1,300 well-investigated concepts.

It includes 11,000 partially validated concepts.

The top-levels of the ontology effectively represent most Arabic meanings.

Abstract

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.