Towards the construction of a comprehensive Arabic lexical reference system

Arabic is a Semitic language spoken by millions of people in 20 different countries. However, not much work has been done in the field of online dictionaries or lexical resources. WordNet is an example of a lexical resource that has not been yet developed to its full extent for Arabic. WordNet, a lexical database developed by Professor George Miller and his team at Princeton University, has seen life 20 years ago. Ever since then, it has proved to be widely successful and extremely necessary for today’s demands. Accordingly, the motivation of developing an Arabic WordNet (AWN) became strong. This project addresses the nominal part of WordNet as the first step towards the construction of a comprehensive AWN. The nominal part means nouns as a part of speech.