&
First Linguistic
Search Engine
the Arabic Ontology
Birzeit University launched a linguistic
search engine with 150 multilingual
lexicons and a linguistic ontology for
Arabic. The search engine contains the
world’s largest Arabic lexical database,
which is a non-profit, long-term research
project that aims to provide people with
an innovative tool to find translations,
synonyms, and definitions in all domains
and disciplines.
The Arabic ontology, which is a
classification and a tree of the meanings
of Arabic terms, is based on state-of-
the-art science, rather than the native
speakers’ knowledge as in dictionaries.
Dr. Mustafa Jarrar, inventor of the
linguistic search engine, explained that
although the engine is the first of its
kind in terms of the quality and quantity
of linguistic information presented,
the launch is the first phase of a bigger
project. He added that he aims to
build a comprehensive linguistic data
graph, which will include syntactic,
morphological, and semantic features, as
well as linking these to other languages
to better equip the IT industry with the
resources that they currently miss.
Jarrar demonstrated that the Arabic
ontology is represented in logic and as
such can be understood by machines
and used in modern applications, such as
semantic information retrieval, machine
translation and semantic disambiguation,
big data and information integration,
the Semantic Web, and others. He
noted that the ontology presents a new
methodological paradigm in lexical
semantics and lexicon engineering.
ontology.birzei t .e d u