Studying the history of the Arabic language: language technology and a large-scale historical corpus

Authors

Yonatan Belinkov, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Alexander Magidow, University of Rhode Island
Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Qatar Computing Research Institute
Avi Shmidman, Bar-Ilan University
Maxim Romanov, Universität Wien

Document Type

Article

Date of Original Version

12-1-2019

Abstract

Arabic is a widely-spoken language with a long and rich history, but existing corpora and language technology focus mostly on modern Arabic and its varieties.Therefore, studying the history of the language has so far been mostly limited to manual analyses on a small scale. In this work, we present a large-scale historical corpus of the written Arabic language, spanning 1400 years. We describe our efforts to clean and process this corpus using Arabic NLP tools, including the identification of reused text.We study the history of the Arabic language using a novel automatic periodization algorithm, as well as other techniques.Our findings confirm the established division of written Arabic into Modern Standard and Classical Arabic, and confirm other established periodizations, while suggesting that written Arabic may be divisible into still further periods of development.

Publication Title, e.g., Journal

Language Resources and Evaluation

Volume

53

Issue

4

Citation/Publisher Attribution

Belinkov, Yonatan, Alexander Magidow, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Avi Shmidman, and Maxim Romanov. "Studying the history of the Arabic language: language technology and a large-scale historical corpus." Language Resources and Evaluation 53, 4 (2019): 771-805. doi: 10.1007/s10579-019-09460-w.