Proposals for a normalized representation of Standard Arabic full form lexica

Standardized lexical resources are an important prerequisite for the development of robust and wide coverage natural language processing application. Therefore, we applied the Lexical Markup Framework, a recent ISO initiative towards standards for designing, implementing and representing lexical resources, on a test bed of data for an Arabic full form lexicon. Besides minor structural accommodation that would be needed in order to take into account the traditional root-based organization of Arabic dictionaries, the LMF proposal appeared to be suitable to our purpose, especially because of the separate management of the hierarchical data structure (LMF core model) and elementary linguistic descriptors (data categories).