Extracting Arabic semantic graph from Aljazeera.net

Collaborative knowledge bases such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary became valuable lexical semantic resources with a high influence in diverse Natural Language Processing tasks. Although Arabic collaborative knowledge bases are in general poorly informatized and significantly different from traditional linguistic knowledge bases in various respects. Aljazeera.net is professionally edited and has rich semantic structure. It constitutes an asset, an impediment and a challenge for research in Arabic Natural Language Processing. This paper addresses one such major impediment, namely the lack of suitable tools to access the knowledge stored in these large semantic knowledge bases. We present a framework designed for mining the explicit and implicit lexical semantic information impeded in the structure and the content of Aljazeera.net. Furthermore, it provides an efficient and structured access to the resulted semantic graph. This framework will be freely available for research purposes to meet the needs of Arabic Natural Language Processing community.