Studying the History of the Arabic Language: Language Technology and a Large-Scale Historical Corpus

arXiv · September 11, 2018 · Significant research

Summary

This paper introduces a large-scale historical corpus of written Arabic spanning 1400 years. The corpus was cleaned and processed using Arabic NLP tools, including identification of reused text. The study uses a novel automatic periodization algorithm to study the history of the Arabic language, confirming the division into Modern Standard and Classical Arabic. Why it matters: This resource enables further computational research into the evolution of Arabic and the development of NLP tools for historical texts.

Keywords

Arabic · historical corpus · NLP · periodization · language technology

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