Azhary: An Arabic Lexical Ontology

Abstract

Arabic language is the most spoken languages in the Semitic languages group, and one of the most common languages in the world spoken by more than 422 million. It is also of paramount importance to Muslims, it is a sacred language of the Islamic Holly Book (Quran) and prayer (and other acts of worship) in Islam is performed only by mastering some of Arabic words. Arabic is also a major ritual language of a number of Christian churches in the Arab world and it is also used in writing several intellectual and religious Jewish books in the Middle Ages. Despite this, there is no semantic Arabic lexicon which researchers can depend on. In this paper we introduce Azhary as a lexical ontology for the Arabic language. It groups Arabic words into sets of synonyms called synsets, and records a number of relationships between words such as synonym, antonym, hypernym, hyponym, meronym, holonym and association relations. The ontology contains 26,195 words organized in 13,328 synsets. It has been developed and contrasted against AWN which is the most common available Arabic lexical ontology. keywords: Arabic Language, Ontology, WordNet, Semantic Web, Arabic Lexicon.