Building an International Corpus of Arabic (ICA): Progress of Compilation Stage

This paper focuses on three axes. The first axis gives a survey of the importance of corpora in language studies e.g. lexicography, grammar, semantics, Natural Language Processing and other areas. The second axis demonstrates how the Arabic language lacks textual resources, such as corpora and tools for corpus analysis and the effected of this lack on the quality of Arabic language applications. There are rarely successful trials in compiling Arabic corpora, therefore, the third axis presents the technical design of the International Corpus of Arabic (ICA), a newly established representative corpus of Arabic that is intended to cover the Arabic language as being used all over the Arab world. The corpus is planned to support various Arabic studies that depends on authentic data, in addition to building Arabic Natural Language Processing Applications.