# A Benchmark and Scoring Algorithm for Enriching Arabic Synonyms

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02232 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02232/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [A Panoramic Survey of Natural Language Processing in the Arab World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12631/) (2020)
- [Curras + Baladi: Towards a Levantine Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09692/) (2022)
- [The Arabic Ontology -- An Arabic Wordnet with Ontologically Clean Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09664/) (2022)
- [ArabGlossBERT: Fine-Tuning BERT on Context-Gloss Pairs for WSD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09685/) (2022)
- [Extracting Synonyms from Bilingual Dictionaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00600/) (2020)
- [Lisan: Yemeni, Iraqi, Libyan, and Sudanese Arabic Dialect Copora with Morphological Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06468/) (2022)
- [Current Trends and Approaches in Synonyms Extraction: Potential Adaptation to Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10412/) (2022)
- [The CQC Algorithm: Cycling in Graphs to Semantically Enrich and Enhance a Bilingual Dictionary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1402.2561/) (2014)
- [An Algorithm for Fuzzification of WordNets, Supported by a Mathematical Proof](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04042/) (2020)
- [Interval Probabilistic Fuzzy WordNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10660/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Nabra: Syrian Arabic Dialects with Morphological Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17315/) (2023)
- [SALMA: Arabic Sense-Annotated Corpus and WSD Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19029/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [To Word Senses and Beyond: Inducing Concepts with Contextualized Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.20054/) (2024)
- [Building from Scratch: A Multi-Agent Framework with Human-in-the-Loop for Multilingual Legal Terminology Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12950/) (2025)
- [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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper addresses the task of extending a given synset with additional synonyms taking into account synonymy strength as a fuzzy value. Given a mono/multilingual synset and a threshold (a fuzzy value [0-1]), our goal is to extract new synonyms above this threshold from existing lexicons. We present twofold contributions: an algorithm and a benchmark dataset. The dataset consists of 3K candidate synonyms for 500 synsets. Each candidate synonym is annotated with a fuzzy value by four linguists. The dataset is important for (i) understanding how much linguists (dis/)agree on synonymy, in addition to (ii) using the dataset as a baseline to evaluate our algorithm. Our proposed algorithm extracts synonyms from existing lexicons and computes a fuzzy value for each candidate. Our evaluations show that the algorithm behaves like a linguist and its fuzzy values are close to those proposed by linguists (using RMSE and MAE). The dataset and a demo page are publicly available at https://portal.sina.birzeit.edu/synonyms.