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Building Annotated Written and Spoken Arabic LRs in NEMLAR Project

The NEMLAR project: Network for Euro-Mediterranean LAnguage Resource and human language technology development and support (www.nemlar.org) was a project supported by the EC with partners from Europe and Arabic countries, whose objective is to build a network of specialized partners to promote and support the development of Arabic Language Resources (LRs) in the Mediterranean region. The project focused on identifying the state of the art of LRs in the region, assessing priority requirements through consultations with language industry and communication players, and establishing a protocol for developing and identifying a Basic Language Resource Kit (BLARK) for Arabic, and to assess first priority requirements. The BLARK is defined as the minimal set of language resources that is necessary to do any pre-competitive research and education, in addition to the development of crucial components for any future NLP industry. Following the identification of high priority resources the NEMLAR partners agreed to focus on, and produce three main resources, which are 1) Annotated Arabic written corpus of about 500 K words, 2) Arabic speech corpus for TTS applications of 2x5 hours, and 3) Arabic broadcast news speech corpus of 40 hours Modern Standard Arabic. For each of the resources underlying linguistic models and assumptions of the corpus, technical specifications, methodologies for the collection and building of the resources, validation and verification mechanisms were put and applied for the three LRs.