The Design of a Corpus of Contemporary Arabic (CCA)

Corpora are an important resource for both teaching and research. Since Arabic lacks enough resources in this field, a research project has been designed to compile a corpus, which represents the state of the Arabic language at the present time and the needs of end-users. This report presents the result of a survey of the needs of teachers of Arabic as a foreign language (TAFL) and language engineers. A quantitative analysis of the result shows that a number of text types should have priority in the corpus. However, even the less useful categories were judged “useful” by some of the respondents, so we should not exclude these entirely. Overall, our survey confirms our view that existing corpora are too narrowly limited in genre, and that there is a need for a corpus of contemporary Arabic covering a broad range of text-types. Our survey also showed support for the inclusion of parallel English-Arabic samples. Supplementary questions showed support for potential use in wide range of Language Engineering applications; and indicated that teachers of Arabic as a foreign language already make significant use of computers in teaching, and want to include contemporary, authentic examples.