# Shamela: A Large-Scale Historical Arabic Corpus

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.08989 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08989/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 28 Dec 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

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- [Can LLMs Write Faithfully? An Agent-Based Evaluation of LLM-generated Islamic Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24438/) (2025)
- [Open Korean Historical Corpus: A Millennia-Scale Diachronic Collection of Public Domain Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24541/) (2025)
- [A Large and Diverse Arabic Corpus for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09227/) (2022)
- [Harnessing Multilingual Resources to Question Answering in Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08024/) (2022)
- [Tahakom LLM Guidelines and Recipes: From Pre-training Data to an Arabic LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13481/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Arabic is a widely-spoken language with a rich and long history spanning more than fourteen centuries. Yet existing Arabic corpora largely focus on the modern period or lack sufficient diachronic information. We develop a large-scale, historical corpus of Arabic of about 1 billion words from diverse periods of time. We clean this corpus, process it with a morphological analyzer, and enhance it by detecting parallel passages and automatically dating undated texts. We demonstrate its utility with selected case-studies in which we show its application to the digital humanities.