2 - Under the Hood of arabiCorpus

Summary

Introduction

Several years ago, as free internet interfaces to very large English corpora began to become available (such as those listed at corpus.byu.edu), I began to get a bad case of corpus-envy. I had a never-ending stream of questions about Arabic words and their usage, and nowhere to go to find real data about them. I started to search for available Arabic corpora and found that while several existed (such as the Arabic Gigaword), most were in a form that was intended to be exploited by trained corpus linguists. Not being one of those myself, I made feeble attempts to use these corpora for my purposes, but always found the experience daunting. I did not necessarily need to have all the capabilities that the English sites had (like searching on parts of speech, for example). I simply wanted to be able to go to a website, type in an Arabic word in a basic dictionary form, and have the site return a multitude of authentic examples of that word in all its forms being used in authentic contexts. In talking with other scholars and students, I found similar sentiments. Although we would love to have powerful tools such as those available for English, we would be very content with much less powerful tools as long as they performed those basic functions.

The primary purpose of this chapter is not to show how cleverly the corpus website arabiCorpus.byu.edu was programmed, but rather to demonstrate how a technically untrained person, with limited and self-taught programming skills, was nevertheless able to make something relatively useful for both students and researchers of Arabic. It is also meant as something of a kindly rebuke of more technical corpus researchers, who despite far superior technical skills have not produced products that are accessible to normal students and researchers of the Arabic language. I recognise that this is partially because they were not aiming to produce such a thing, and for a number of other reasons as well, but I still believe that if those with the technical skill were to put their minds to this problem, we would be able to provide the Arabic language community with incredibly useful tools.