aConCorde: Towards an open-source, extendable concordancer for Arabic

Abstract

There is, currently, a surge of activity surrounding Arabic corpus linguistics. As the number of available Arabic corpora continues to grow, there is an increasing need for robust tools that can process this data, whether for research or teaching. One such tool that is useful for both of these purposes is the concordancer – a simple tool for displaying a specified target word in its context. However, obtaining one that can cope reliably with the Arabic language had proved difficult. Also, there was a desire to add some novel features to the standard concordancer to enhance its usefulness within the classroom – easy-to-use root- and stem-based concordance and integration with corpus clustering algorithms are two examples. Therefore, aConCorde was created to provide such a tool to the community.