Towards Structuring an Arabic-English Machine-Readable Dictionary through Parsing Expression Grammar
Diaa Fayed, Aly Fahmy, Mohsen Rashwan, Wafaa Kamel
International Journal of Computational Linguistics Research, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2014.
DOI: 
Link: http://www.dline.info/jcl/fulltext/v5n1/1.pdf
Abstract:
Dictionaries are rich sources of lexical information about words that is required for many applications of human language technology. However, publishers prepare printed dictionaries for human usage not for machine processing. This paper presents a method to structure partly a machine-readable version of the Arabic-English Al-Mawrid dictionary. The method converted the entries of Al-Mawrid from a stream of words and punctuation marks into hierarchical structures. The hierarchical structure or tree structure expresses the components of each dictionary entry in explicit format. The components of an entry are subentries and each subentry consists of defining phrases, domain labels, cross-references, and translation equivalences. We designed the proposed method as cascaded steps where parsing is the main step. We implemented the parser through the parsing expression grammar formalism. In conclusion, although Arabic dictionaries do not have microstructure standardization, this study demonstrated that it is possible to structure them automatically or semiautomatically with plausible accuracy after inducing their microstructure.