Essex Gateway to Arabic Linguistics Resources Project

Kakia Chatsiou (achats @ essex.ac.uk)9th Language and Computation Day08th October 2010

Outline

• About the project• Project Objectives• Deliverables• Completed Deliverables• Website Organisation• Demonstration• Next steps

About the project

• Funded by a departmental research incentive scheme 2009-2010 with project title “Creating Resources in support of research in Arabic”

• Duration of 6 months• 2 principal investigators (Sonja

Eisenbeiss & Louisa Sadler)• 1 research assistant (myself) with the

help of Georgia Chatsiou on web and accessibility issues

Project Objectives

• To create infrastructure to support research and teaching on Arabic (and Semitic) in the dept of Language and Linguistics

• To facilitate collaboration between staff and students in the dept and open up routes for collaboration with researchers in other sites.

• To further enhance the visibility of the Dept and the University as a centre for research on Arabic

• To build links across departments and sectors in the university

Deliverables

• Creation of a website for tools and resources on Arabic linguistics (incl. resources for theoretical, computational, psycholinguistic research)

• Compilation of a searchable bibliography of works on Arabic (and Semitic) linguistics

• Investigation into availability and usability of existing corpus resources & associated tools for Arabic

• Wiki for news and discussions (to aid information sharing)

• Establishment of a (rudimentary) document repository of dissertations and other materials

Completed Deliverables (1)

• Website with tools and resources on Arabic• Bibliography (currently 944 entries and

counting) in .bib and .html searchable format

• Alphabetic list of corpus resources with additional information where available such as language variety, medium (written/spoken), adult/child corpus, encoding, size, compiler, availability and licensing, associated tools/corpora, other notes

Completed Deliverables (2)

• Incorporation of the Arabic Syntax Wiki for information exchange within Essex (information was restructured and design was modified to match departmental theme)

• Establishment of a list of dissertations on Arabic awarded by the department between 1982-2010 with links to the Albert Sloman Library records and .bib entries. A bibliography of all is also available for download from the same page.

Website Organisation

• Part of the departmental pages (one of the limitations as well); additional internal navigation menu added on the right

• Pages include: Arabic@Essex, Corpora, Dictionaries, Useful Tools, Bibliography, Dissertations, Conferences, Funding, Research, Jobs, Journals

Demonstration

http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/research/arabic/

Next Steps

• Internal testing of the current version of the website (within the department & friends); after incorporating any changes, dissemination to mailing lists/partners

• Maintain and enhance the bibliography• Complete Project Documentation• Follow up and acquire Arabic PhD

dissertations from Alumni

Questions?