# The Arabic Ontology -- An Arabic Wordnet with Ontologically Clean Content

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.09664 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09664/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [Using Arabic Wordnet for semantic indexation in information retrieval system](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.2499/) (2013)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [AraFinNLP 2024: The First Arabic Financial NLP Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09818/) (2024)
- [Nabra: Syrian Arabic Dialects with Morphological Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17315/) (2023)
- [A Benchmark and Scoring Algorithm for Enriching Arabic Synonyms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02232/) (2023)
- [SALMA: Arabic Sense-Annotated Corpus and WSD Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19029/) (2023)
- [Lisan: Yemeni, Iraqi, Libyan, and Sudanese Arabic Dialect Copora with Morphological Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06468/) (2022)
- [ArBanking77: Intent Detection Neural Model and a New Dataset in Modern and Dialectical Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19034/) (2023)
- [Arabic Fine-Grained Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17333/) (2023)
- [Context-Gloss Augmentation for Improving Arabic Target Sense Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03126/) (2023)
- [Offensive Hebrew Corpus and Detection using BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02724/) (2023)
- [Current Trends and Approaches in Synonyms Extraction: Potential Adaptation to Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10412/) (2022)
- [Qabas: An Open-Source Arabic Lexicographic Database](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06598/) (2024)
- [NLU-STR at SemEval-2024 Task 1: Generative-based Augmentation and Encoder-based Scoring for Semantic Textual Relatedness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00659/) (2024)
- [Event-Arguments Extraction Corpus and Modeling using BERT for Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21153/) (2024)
- [Konooz: Multi-domain Multi-dialect Corpus for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12615/) (2025)
- [ArabicNLU 2024: The First Arabic Natural Language Understanding Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20663/) (2024)
- [Advancing the Arabic WordNet: Elevating Content Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20215/) (2024)
- [QuranMorph: Morphologically Annotated Quranic Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18148/) (2025)
- [SinaTools: Open Source Toolkit for Arabic Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01523/) (2024)
- [MASRAD: Arabic Terminology Management Corpora with Semi-Automatic Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19211/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a formal Arabic wordnet built on the basis of a carefully designed ontology hereby referred to as the Arabic Ontology. The ontology provides a formal representation of the concepts that the Arabic terms convey, and its content was built with ontological analysis in mind, and benchmarked to scientific advances and rigorous knowledge sources as much as this is possible, rather than to only speakers' beliefs as lexicons typically are. A comprehensive evaluation was conducted thereby demonstrating that the current version of the top-levels of the ontology can top the majority of the Arabic meanings. The ontology consists currently of about 1,300 well-investigated concepts in addition to 11,000 concepts that are partially validated. The ontology is accessible and searchable through a lexicographic search engine (https://ontology.birzeit.edu) that also includes about 150 Arabic-multilingual lexicons, and which are being mapped and enriched using the ontology. The ontology is fully mapped with Princeton WordNet, Wikidata, and other resources.