--- title: "Developing LMF-XML Bilingual Dictionaries for Colloquial Arabic Dialects — Graff 2012" description: "Three bilingual dictionaries of Moroccan, Syrian and Iraqi Arabic, first published in the 1960s, are being revised… 8 references, cited by 2 papers here." authors: ["David Graff", "Mohamed Maamouri"] year: 2012 venue: "Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)" source: "https://aclanthology.org/L12-1245/" licence: "CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/graff-2012-developing-lmf-xml-bilingual-dictionaries/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/graff-2012-developing-lmf-xml-bilingual-dictionaries/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2012](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2012/page/2/) / Developing LMF-XML Bilingual Dictionaries for Colloquial Arabic Dialects # Developing LMF-XML Bilingual Dictionaries for Colloquial Arabic Dialects **Authors:** [David Graff](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/david-graff/) and [Mohamed Maamouri](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/mohamed-maamouri/) · **Year:** 2012 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L12-1245/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L12-1245.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W1194092377) **Citations:** 11 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · 2 in our library, of the 140,884 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary Three bilingual dictionaries of Moroccan, Syrian and Iraqi Arabic, first published in the 1960s, are being revised jointly by Georgetown University Press and the Linguistic Data Consortium. The originals each used their own Latin-based transcription and their own entry organization, which made it hard to compare the dialects with one another or with Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The project re-spells every Arabic form twice: - **Arabic script** spelling follows MSA cognate roots, using Wehr (1994) as the reference. This gives one recognizable written form across dialects. - **IPA** records how each dialect actually pronounces the word. Grammatical abbreviations are turned into explicit features. New headwords are added from recent corpora. All content lives in a relational database with the same schema for every dialect, edited through web-based annotation and review tools, and exported as XML following the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF, ISO 24,613). At the time of writing, Iraqi was finished, Moroccan was in final checks and Syrian was ongoing. Over 2400 MSA roots, about two-thirds of Wehr's inventory, appear in at least one dialect. The outcome is both printed editions and a machine-readable cross-dialect lexicon for NLP. ## Key points - **Sources:** - GUP Moroccan (Harrell & Sobelman), GUP Syrian (Stowasser & Ani) and GUP Iraqi (Clarity et al.), all keyboarded from the printed volumes. - The Syrian Arabic-English half was never published, so it was rebuilt from archived index cards and galley proofs. - **Consonant-skeleton classes per dialect** (Syrian incomplete): | Dialect | Total classes | Shared with MSA | |---|---|---| | Iraqi | 4368 | 1993 | | Syrian | 3323 | 2030 | | Moroccan | 3014 | 1590 | - **Roots shared with MSA across dialects:** - Iraqi/Syrian: 1676 - Iraqi/Moroccan: 1433 - Syrian/Moroccan: 1157 - All three: 1116 - **Schema change:** the Iraqi "headword" table was split into separate "lemma" and "wordform" tables. Each lemma has at most one citation form, and other forms carry labels such as plural or feminine. Tables are prefixed with ISO dialect codes (ary, apc, acm). - **Encoding and export:** - Arabic is keyboarded in Buckwalter transliteration with full short-vowel diacritics. - The LMF DTD was extended with "id" attributes so XML can be traced back to database rows. - Root/skeleton entries are sorted in Arabic collation order. Lemmas within them are ordered verbs first, then nouns, adjectives and so on, with verbs in traditional verbal-form order. ## Interesting ideas - Spelling dialect words by their historical root rather than their sound, while keeping a separate IPA layer, gives one shared lookup key plus faithful per-variety detail. - Separating "lemma" from "wordform", with one flagged citation form and labeled inflected forms, removes ambiguity from what "headword" means. - Giving every dialect an identical table set, distinguished only by a language-code prefix, lets one tool codebase serve all varieties and supports cross-variety queries. - Gating a release through status flags, filtered extraction queries and a final coherence check means only complete, approved items ship. - Adding stable ids to exported elements, even beyond the standard spec, keeps every output item traceable to its source record. ## For Mova How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests: - **I1** (tokens): Lemmas could carry a normalized key (e.g., one entry for colour/color, or archaic and modern forms) alongside the attested surface spelling, so lookup unifies variants without losing what was written. - **I2** (tokens): The English lexicon could store irregular plurals and participles as labeled wordform rows under a lemma, making lemmatization decisions inspectable rather than implicit. - **I3** (tree): Converted UD treebanks and dialect variants could share one storage schema keyed by source, so the same validators and conversion tools run on all of them and cross-treebank comparisons become simple queries. - **I4** (learn): Silver data agreed by witness parsers could pass the same three gates (annotator/LLM flags, selection rules, structural completeness checks) before entering training. - **I5** (world): Each entity, state or event in the world of a text could carry an id pointing to the token span and frame that created it, supporting step-by-step explanations of answers. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/) Topics: [🐪 Semitic languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/semitic-languages/) ## Institutions - [University of Pennsylvania](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-pennsylvania/) — University, Philadelphia, United States · 143 works · 56,645 citations ## Cite Cite as: David Graff and Mohamed Maamouri. 2012. Developing LMF-XML Bilingual Dictionaries for Colloquial Arabic Dialects. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12). The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{graff2012developing, title = {{Developing LMF-XML Bilingual Dictionaries for Colloquial Arabic Dialects}}, author = {David Graff and Mohamed Maamouri}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)}, year = {2012}, doi = {10.63317/3i39ckumazu7}, url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3i39ckumazu7} } ``` - [← previous A Mixed Deterministic Model for Coreference Resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/yuan-2012-mixed-deterministic-model-coreference-resolution/) - [next → Medical Term Extraction in an Arabic Medical Corpus](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/samy-2012-medical-term-extraction-arabic-medical/) - [↑ back to papers of 2012](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2012/page/2/) ## References 8 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Clarity, B., Stowasser, K., Wolfe, G. eds. (2003 [1965]) A Dictionary of Iraqi Arabic. Georgetown University Press. Washington, D.C. Appen Pty. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Clarity%2C+B%2E%2C+Stowasser%2C+K%2E%2C+Wolfe%2C+G%2E+eds%2E+%282003+%5B1965%5D%29+A+Dictionary+of+Iraqi+Arabic%2E+Georgetown+University+Press%2E+Washington%2C+D%2EC%2E+Appen+Pty%2E) 2. Ltd. (2006) Iraqi Arabic Conversational Telephone Speech and Transcripts. LDC Catalog Nos.: LDC2006S45, LDC2006T16. Linguistic Data Consortium. Philadelphia, PA. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ltd%2E+%282006%29+Iraqi+Arabic+Conversational+Telephone+Speech+and+Transcripts%2E+LDC+Catalog+Nos%2E%3A+LDC2006S45%2C+LDC2006T16%2E+Linguistic+Data+Consortium%2E+Philadelphia%2C+PA%2E) 3. Graff, D., Buckwalter, T., Jin, H., Maamouri, M. (2006) ‘Lexicon Development for Varieties of Spoken Colloquial Arabic.’ In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) May 22-28, 2006. Pages 999-1004. [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/graff-2006-lexicon-development-varieties-spoken-colloquial/) 4. Harrel, R., Sobleman, H, eds. (2008 [1996]) A Dictionary of Moroccan Arabic. Georgetown University Press. Washington, D.C. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Harrel%2C+R%2E%2C+Sobleman%2C+H%2C+eds%2E+%282008+%5B1996%5D%29+A+Dictionary+of+Moroccan+Arabic%2E+Georgetown+University+Press%2E+Washington%2C+D%2EC%2E) 5. Maamouri, M, Graff, D., Jin, H., Cieri, C. (2004a) ‘Dialectal Arabic Orthography-based Transcription & CTS Levantine Arabic Collection.’ EARS PI Meeting and RT-04 Workshop, IBM Executive Conference Center, Palisades, NY, USA; November 7-11, 2004. [http://www.sainc.com/richtrans2004/](http://www.sainc.com/richtrans2004/) [↗](http://www.sainc.com/richtrans2004/) 6. Maamouri, M., Buckwalter, T., Cieri, C. (2004b) ‘Dialectal Arabic Telephone Speech Corpus: Principles, Tool design and Transcription Convention.’ In Proceedings of the NEMLAR Arabic Language Resources and Tools Conference Sept. 22-23, 2004. Pages 55-60. Cairo, Egypt. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Maamouri%2C+M%2E%2C+Buckwalter%2C+T%2E%2C+Cieri%2C+C%2E+%282004b%29+%E2%80%98Dialectal+Arabic+Telephone+Speech+Corpus%3A+Principles%2C+Tool+design+and+Transcription+Convention%2E%E2%80%99+In+Proceedings+of+the+NEMLAR+Arabic+Language+Resources) 7. Stowasser, K., Ani, M. (2004 [1964]) A Dictionary of Syrian Arabic. Georgetown University Press. Washington, D.C. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Stowasser%2C+K%2E%2C+Ani%2C+M%2E+%282004+%5B1964%5D%29+A+Dictionary+of+Syrian+Arabic%2E+Georgetown+University+Press%2E+Washington%2C+D%2EC%2E) 8. Wehr, H. (1994) Arabic English Dictionary. The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic. Editor: J M.Cowan. (Fourth Edition). Spoken Language Services, Inc. Urbana, IL. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Wehr%2C+H%2E+%281994%29+Arabic+English+Dictionary%2E+The+Hans+Wehr+Dictionary+of+Modern+Written+Arabic%2E+Editor%3A+J+M%2ECowan%2E+%28Fourth+Edition%29%2E+Spoken+Language+Services%2C+Inc%2E+Urbana%2C+IL%2E)