Name: Shamela
Description: a large-scale, historical corpus of Arabic of about 1 billion
  words from diverse periods of time
Provider: Multiple Institutions 
Paper Title: Shamela: A Large-Scale Historical Arabic Corpus
  
Tasks: text generation, language modeling
Venue Name: Workshop on Language Technology Resources and Tools for Digital Humanities
Authors: Yonatan Belinkov,Alexander Magidow,Maxim Romanov,Avi Shmidman,Moshe Koppel
Abstract: Arabic is a widely-spoken language with a rich and long history spanning more than fourteen centuries. Yet existing Arabic corpora largely focus on the modern period or lack sufficient diachronic information. We develop a large-scale, historical corpus of Arabic of about 1 billion words from diverse periods of time. We clean this corpus, process it with a morphological analyzer, and enhance it by detecting parallel passages and automatically dating undated texts. We demonstrate its utility with selected case-studies in which we show its application to the digital humanities.