Crowdsourcing has been used recently as an alternative to traditional costly annotation by many natural language processing groups. In this paper, we explore the use of Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) in order to assess the feasibility of using AMT workers (also known as Turkers) to perform linguistic annotation of Arabic. We used a gold standard data set taken from the Quran corpus project annotated with part-of-speech and morphological information. An Arabic language qualification test was used to filter out potential non-qualified participants. Two experiments were performed, a part-of-speech tagging task in where the annotators were asked to choose a correct word-category from a multiple choice list and case ending identification task. The results obtained so far showed that annotating Arabic grammatical case is harder than POS tagging, and crowdsourcing for Arabic linguistic annotation requiring expert annotators could be not as effective as other crowdsourcing experiments requiring less expertise and qualifications.

This paper describes the underlying software platform used to develop and publish annotations for the Quranic Arabic Corpus (QAC). The QAC (Dukes, Atwell and Habash, 2011) is a multimodal language resource that integrates deep tagging, interlinear translation, multiple speech recordings, visualization and collaborative analysis for the Classical Arabic language of the Quran. Available online at http://corpus.quran.com, the website is a popular study guide for Quranic Arabic, used by over 1.2 million visitors over the past year. We provide a description of the underlying software system that has been used to develop the corpus annotations. The multimodal data is made available online through an accessible cross-referenced web interface. Although our Linguistic Analysis Multimodal Platform (LAMP) has been applied to the Classical Arabic language of the Quran, we argue that our annotation model and software architecture may be of interest to other related corpus linguistics projects. Work related to LAMP includes recent efforts for annotating other Classical languages, such as Ancient Greek and Latin (Bamman, Mambrini and Crane, 2009), as well as commercial systems (e.g. Logos Bible study) that provide access to syntactic tagging for the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament (Brannan, 2011).

The Quranic Arabic Corpus (http://corpus.quran.com) is an annotated linguistic resource with multiple layers of annotation including morphological segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and syntactic analysis using dependency grammar. The motivation behind this work is to produce a resource that enables further analysis of the Quran, the 1,400 year old central religious text of Islam. This paper describes a new approach to morphological annotation of Quranic Arabic, a genre difficult to compare with other forms of Arabic. Processing Quranic Arabic is a unique challenge from a computational point of view, since the vocabulary and spelling differ from Modern Standard Arabic. The Quranic Arabic Corpus differs from other Arabic computational resources in adopting a tagset that closely follows traditional Arabic grammar. We made this decision in order to leverage a large body of existing historical grammatical analysis, and to encourage online collaborative annotation. In this paper, we discuss how the unique challenge of morphological annotation of Quranic Arabic is solved using a multi-stage approach. The different stages include automatic morphological tagging using diacritic edit-distance, two-pass manual verification, and online collaborative annotation. This process is evaluated to validate the appropriateness of the chosen methodology.

The Quranic Arabic Dependency Treebank (QADT) is part of the Quranic Arabic Corpus (http://corpus.quran.com), an online linguistic resource organized by the University of Leeds, and developed through online collaborative annotation. The website has become a popular study resource for Arabic and the Quran, and is now used by over 1,500 researchers and students daily. This paper presents the treebank, explains the choice of syntactic representation, and highlights key parts of the annotation guidelines. The text being analyzed is the Quran, the central religious book of Islam, written in classical Quranic Arabic (c. 600 CE). To date, all 77,430 words of the Quran have a manually verified morphological analysis, and syntactic analysis is in progress. 11,000 words of Quranic Arabic have been syntactically annotated as part of a gold standard treebank. Annotation guidelines are especially important to promote consistency for a corpus which is being developed through online collaboration, since often many people will participate from different backgrounds and with different levels of linguistic expertise. The treebank is available online for collaborative correction to improve accuracy, with suggestions reviewed by expert Arabic linguists, and compared against existing published books of Quranic Syntax.