---
title: "Construction and Annotation of the Jordan Comprehensive"
description: "Arabic lacks an open corpus that represents the contemporary language as a whole. 23 references, cited by 3 papers here."
authors: ["Majdi Sawalha", "Faisal Alshargi", "Abdallah AlShdaifat", "Sane Yagi", "Mohammad A. Qudah"]
year: 2019
venue: "Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/W19-4616/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/w19-4616"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/sawalha-2019-construction-annotation-jordan-comprehensive-contemporary/"
---
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# Construction and Annotation of the Jordan Comprehensive Contemporary Arabic Corpus (JCCA)

**Authors:** [Majdi Sawalha](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/majdi-sawalha/), [Faisal Alshargi](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/faisal-alshargi/), Abdallah AlShdaifat, [Sane Yagi](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/sane-yagi/) and Mohammad A. Qudah · **Year:** 2019 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/wanlp/) ([WANLP 2019](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/wanlp/2019/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W19-4616/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W19-4616.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/w19-4616](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w19-4616) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2970345257)

**Citations:** 5 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [3](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/sawalha-2019-construction-annotation-jordan-comprehensive-contemporary/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Arabic lacks an open corpus that represents the contemporary language as a whole. Existing collections are mostly newspaper text, mix classical with modern material, or cost money, and morphosyntactically annotated data is scarce. The authors built the Jordan Comprehensive Contemporary Arabic Corpus (JCCA), a corpus of roughly 100 million words modelled on the British National Corpus (BNC). It reuses the BNC's text types and domains and adds written material from 20 Arab countries, plus transcribed speech from the major dialect regions. The whole corpus was tagged automatically for morphology and syntax. A one-million-word snapshot was then checked manually or semi-manually, labelled for sentiment and glossed in English. The checking was done in an extended version of the DIWAN annotation tool, which gained a tag-set grounded in traditional Arabic grammar and fields for roots and morphological patterns. Spoken items are also glossed with their full Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) forms. The verified snapshot is meant as a gold standard for judging automatic annotators. The corpus as a whole gives lexicography and NLP a balanced, freely available, BNC-comparable reference.

## Key points
- About 100M words, designed after the BNC. The paper is inconsistent on the written/spoken split, giving 83%/17% in one place and 87%/13% in another. The spoken part includes Spontaneous Conversations (4.2%) and Context-Governed Spoken Language (6.2%).
- World Affairs makes up 20M words, drawn from newspapers in 20 Arab countries at roughly 1M words per country. Other written categories include:
  - Imaginative: 16M
  - Social Sciences: ~14M
  - Leisure: 12M
  - Arts, Commerce and Finance, and Applied Sciences: ~7M each
  - Natural and Pure Sciences: ~4M
  - Belief and Thought: ~3M
- DIWAN (Al-Shargi and Rambow, 2015) was extended with:
  - a tag-set based on traditional Arabic grammar;
  - root and morphological-pattern fields for nouns and verbs;
  - features that support semi-manual annotation.
- The verified 1M-word snapshot carries morphological, syntactic, sentiment and English-gloss annotation. Spoken contractions are mapped to their non-contracted MSA equivalents.
- The dialects represented come from the Levant, the Nile region, North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Each article has metadata such as genre, source, date and country. The authors plan to turn JCCA into a yearly monitor corpus.

## Interesting ideas
- Copying the category scheme of an established reference corpus and filling fixed quotas per genre and country keeps one dominant source, such as news, from skewing the data.
- Colloquial contractions are kept as written but paired with a gloss giving their full standard form, so later processing works on canonical words without losing the original text.
- Annotation records each word's root and derivational pattern alongside its tag, giving an explicit picture of how the word is built.
- A moderate-size slice is checked by hand and declared a gold standard, against which every automatic annotator is measured.
- Rich per-document metadata (genre, source, date, country) is treated as data in its own right, usable for guided search and genre-identification training.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (learn): Silver and evaluation sets could be assembled with explicit genre quotas (fables, school texts, word problems, news, dialogue), so that parser and reader scores do not quietly reflect one register.
- **I2** (tokens): English forms like "gonna", "y'all" and "whatcha" could get a reversible full-form layer before tagging, so the UD tree is built over explainable expansions.
- **I3** (tokens): The en crate's morphology could store English derivational families (base plus affix pattern, e.g. "decide → decision → decisive"), helping lemma lookup and linking related verbs and nouns in an explainable way.
- **I4** (learn): A small, frozen, hand-verified treebank slice could serve as the referee for witness-parser agreement and self-induced repair rules, exposing cases where parsers agree but are wrong.
- **I5** (world): Each text's world could hold provenance facts such as genre, date and source, which readers can use to choose interpretation defaults, for example expecting talking animals in fables.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Leipzig University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/leipzig-university/) — University, Leipzig, Germany · 26 works · 8,622 citations
- [University of Jordan](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-jordan/) — University, Amman, Jordan · 14 works · 171 citations
- [University of Sharjah](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-sharjah/) — University, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates · 9 works · 202 citations

📚 Shelves (4): [🖥️ Computer Science](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/) · 16,667 works · [🤖 Artificial Intelligence](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/artificial-intelligence/) · 16,194 works · [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 16,039 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics (1): [Semitic languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/semitic-languages/) · 2,908 works

## Cite

Cite as: Majdi Sawalha, Faisal Alshargi, Abdallah AlShdaifat, Sane Yagi and Mohammad A. Qudah. 2019. Construction and Annotation of the Jordan Comprehensive Contemporary Arabic Corpus (JCCA). Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{sawalha2019construction,
  title = {{Construction and Annotation of the Jordan Comprehensive Contemporary Arabic Corpus (JCCA)}},
  author = {Majdi Sawalha, Faisal Alshargi, Abdallah AlShdaifat, Sane Yagi and Mohammad A. Qudah},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/w19-4616},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w19-4616}
}
```

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## References

23 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 1 November 2026*