An Incremental Approach to Corpus Design and Construction: Application to a Large Contemporary Saudi Corpus

Due to the rapid developments in technology and the sudden expansion of social media use, Dialect Arabic has become an important source of data that needs to be addressed when building Arabic corpora. In this paper, thirty-three Arabic corpora are surveyed to show that despite all of the developments in the literature, Saudi dialect (SD) corpora still need further expansion. This paper contributes to the literature on SD corpora by creating the largest Saudi corpus – the King Saud University Saudi Corpus (KSUSC) – with +1B total words, including +119M SD words. The KSUSC not only is the newest and largest SD corpus but is also diverse, covering 26 domains in text collected from five different sources. This paper also contributes to the literature by developing a new incremental preprocessing system that is used to create relevant lexicons that are then used to clean and normalize the collected data. This incremental system is scalable and can be adapted for different resources and dialects. Moreover, the collection process for building the KSUSC is discussed in detail, and the challenges in collecting SD text with respect to each platform are highlighted. By the end of this paper, different design criteria are proposed and used with the KSUSC to conclude that the resulting corpus can be of great benefit to researchers who are interested in integrating the corpus with their own work or using its resulting lexicons with Saudi-based NLP tasks.