Towards a Psycholinguistic Database of Arabic

Abstract

Psycholinguistic databases are indispensable resources for psycholinguistic and computational research. Many languages have such valuable resources, such as English, Croatian, Dutch, French, and Chinese. Unfortunately, Arabic doesn't have such databases. This research aims at introducing the guidelines for building a psycholinguistic database of Arabic. The database will be available in two phases: the first is a psycholinguistic phase in which subjective ratings are collected for several variables such as concreteness, imageability, subjective frequency, and number of meanings, the second is a computational phase in which ratings are stacked with other linguistic information obtained from corpora, such as root, stem, objective frequency, number of syllables, and word length. This phase is meant to provide an online searchable release that can be used by psycholinguists and computational linguists for building cognitive-based artificial intelligence models. This survey is meant to introduce the building process of the psycholinguistic phase in detail.