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Developing LMF-XML Bilingual Dictionaries for Colloquial Arabic Dialects

The Linguistic Data Consortium and Georgetown University Press are collaborating to create updated editions of bilingual diction- aries that had originally been published in the 1960's for English-speaking learners of Moroccan, Syrian and Iraqi Arabic. In their first editions, these dictionaries used ad hoc Latin-alphabet orthography for each colloquial Arabic dialect, but adopted some proper- ties of Arabic-based writing (collation order of Arabic headwords, clitic attachment to word forms in example phrases); despite their common features, there are notable differences among the three books that impede comparisons across the dialects, as well as com- parisons of each dialect to Modern Standard Arabic. In updating these volumes, we use both Arabic script and International Pho- netic Alphabet orthographies; the former provides a common basis for word recognition across dialects, while the latter provides dialect-specific pronunciations. Our goal is to preserve the full content of the original publications, supplement the Arabic headword inventory with new usages, and produce a uniform lexicon structure expressible via the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF, ISO 24613). To this end, we developed a relational database schema that applies consistently to each dialect, and HTTP-based tools for searching, editing, workflow, review and inventory management.