Creating Arabic Lexical Resources in TEI; A Schema for Discontinuous Morphology Encoding

This article aims at formally grouping lexical and morphological information in order to obtain an electronic resource with respect to the Arabic language starting from the classical dictionary al=q?m?s al=mu???. This contribution examines practical aspects about the adoption of the guidelines provided by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) to encode the Arabic dictionary as a primary source. Moreover, the contribution points out a possible way to integrate semantic, morphological and syntactic information characterizing word patterns within the same TEI document. Specifically, the formalization of word patterns allows us to emphasize additional morphosyntactic regularities mainly concerning word distribution within sentences. Consequently, the obtained digital object represents both the medieval Arabic dictionary and a suitable resource that can be exploited for a number of Natural Language Processing tasks.