A Corpus-based Arabic Valency Dictionary: The Case of Fighting Verbs

Abstract

Empirical pedagogical dictionaries aim at defining words in their context and presenting corpus-based evidence for eachword. They are meant to teach language learners how to use a word correctly. Valency, which describes the arguments of a verb syntactically and semantically, is of unique importance to pedagogical dictionaries. Unfortunately, Arabic lacks corpus-based valency resources. Thus, this paper proposes a monolingual corpus-based valency dictionary, for Arabic learners, covering fighting verbs. The dictionary explores the valency of fighting verbs in Sketch Engine’s uploaded Arabic TenTen corpus. The dictionary compiling method depends on both automatic word sketch function to identify the lexico-syntactic patterns of verbs and on threelayer manual annotation of corpus-driven examples to consolidate the results. Each verb entry, in the dictionary, displays (a) number; (b) phrase type; (c) semantic role; (d) grammatical function of its arguments and (e) definition of its different senses. At least, three annotated examples are provided for each verb sense to illustrate its usage authentically. The dictionary, integrating semantic and syntactic information, facilitates effective learning of new Arabic vocabulary.