# Qabas: An Open-Source Arabic Lexicographic Database

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06598 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06598/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [A Panoramic Survey of Natural Language Processing in the Arab World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12631/) (2020)
- [Wojood: Nested Arabic Named Entity Corpus and Recognition using BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09651/) (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)
- [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)
- [Context-Gloss Augmentation for Improving Arabic Target Sense Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03126/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [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)
- [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)

We present Qabas, a novel open-source Arabic lexicon designed for NLP applications. The novelty of Qabas lies in its synthesis of 110 lexicons. Specifically, Qabas lexical entries (lemmas) are assembled by linking lemmas from 110 lexicons. Furthermore, Qabas lemmas are also linked to 12 morphologically annotated corpora (about 2M tokens), making it the first Arabic lexicon to be linked to lexicons and corpora. Qabas was developed semi-automatically, utilizing a mapping framework and a web-based tool. Compared with other lexicons, Qabas stands as the most extensive Arabic lexicon, encompassing about 58K lemmas (45K nominal lemmas, 12.5K verbal lemmas, and 473 functional-word lemmas). Qabas is open-source and accessible online at https://sina.birzeit.edu/qabas.