Fwd: Arabic and the Universal dictionary

["Youcef Rahal" <y dot rahal at gmail dot com>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ing. Zdenek Broz <zdenek dot broz at gmail dot com>
Date: Jun 21, 2006 8:17 PM
Subject: Arabic and the Universal dictionary
To: contact at arabeyes dot org


Hello

We are working on a system called the Universal dictionary. It is based
on English definitions of wordnet thesaurus and beside English the
system contains more than 40 world languages. Arabic is very important
language but we do not have enough input dictionaries to add Arabic into
the system. We only have your English-Arabic dictionary. To add Arabic
entries automatically we would need German-Arabic and for example
Spanish-Arabic dictionaries so we could eliminate the ambiguity of
English words. Our system is pretty similar to Global wordnet grid. At
http://www.globalwordnet.org/gwa/wordnet_table.htm it is said that
Christiane Fellbaum is already working on entries for Arabic. Do you
know this person? I have sent him a mail but got no answer. If I would
have the file he is creating everyone would have more than 40 Arabic
dictionaries.

To understand how our Universal dictionary works please take a look at
http://www.dicts.info

Our users already suggested hundreds of Arabic entries for our system
but the writing from right to left is giving us a hard time -
http://dicts.info/files/ud/arabic.txt
We do not understand Arabic so by copying the file blindly into our
system we could add many mistakes - we cannot afford that - especially
for Arabic language.

I am sure that if you would help us a bit we would soon be able to add
thousands of Arabic entries into Universal dictionary - everyone would
then have large free Arabic dictionaries. With so many languages out
there we surely need them to understand each other.

So what do you think? Would it be good to have more than 40 free
dictionaries for Arabic by creating a single file with Arabic words
assigned to wordnet definitions? If you will help us we will allow you
to use all newly created Arabic dictionaries in all your projects. Think
about it Arabic-German, Arabic-Spanish, Arabic-Russian even
Arabic-Japanese dictionaries would be available - all we need is the one
file with Arabic words assigned to wordnet definitions.

Best regards

Zdenek Broz / Dicts.info


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--
Youcef Rahal