Database of Arabic Place Names
D A P

©2004-2008 The CJK Dictionary Institute, Inc.

1. Introduction

The CJK Dictionary Institute is engaged in the development and continuous expansion of comprehensive lexical databases for CJK languages and Arabic consisting of approximately eight million entries (see CJK Lexical Resources for details). This document describes our database of Arabic place names. We also maintain a large database of Arabic Personal Names and their variants.

Though Arabic has become a world language of critical importance, lexical resources, especially for proper nouns, are either scarce or exist only on a small scale. Because of the important role place names play in such natural language applications as named entity extraction (NER) and machine translation, we are continuously expanding and revising our Dictionary of Arabic Place Name Variants, which provides systematic coverage of Arabic orthographic variants and common orthographic errors.

It is important to note that although there is a handful of machine translation packages and data providers that offer Arabic place names, their coverage is poor, the data contains many machine-generated errors, and they do not cover variants. Our project may well be the first attempt to build a comprehensive database of Arabic place names that covers the entire world, is accurate, validated, and based on state-of-the art techniques in computational lexicography. Please have a look at the data sample shown in 3. Data Sample below.

2. Why are variants useful?

Identifying, processing and normalizing place names and their numerous variants is useful in a variety of applications, such as:

1. Improving the accuracy of English-to-Arabic machine translation by providing the standard, correct Arabic form.
2. Improving the accuracy of Arabic-to-English machine translation by identifying variants and errors in the original Arabic text.
3. Place name dictionaries for human translators.
4. Entity and information extraction.
5. Segmentation and morphological analysis of Arabic texts.

3. Data Sample

Our database covers both the Arab and non-Arab world, including variants. Only the most common variants are shown in the sample below -- see the next section for more.

Arabic	Buckwalter Transliteration	English	Variant	Error	Country
أبو ظبي	>bw Zby	Abu Dhabi	ابو ظبي	أبو ظبى, ابو ظبى	UAE
الإسكندرية	Al<skndryp	Alexandria	الاسكندرية	الإسكندريه	Egypt
الجزائر	AljzA}r	Algiers		الجزاير	Algeria
برازيليا	brAzylyA	Brasilia	برازيلية	برازيليه	Brazil
القاهرة	AlqAhrp	Cairo		القاهره	Egypt
الشرق الاقصى	Al$rq AlAqSY	Far East		الشرق الاقصي	N/A
ألمانيا	>mAnyA	Germany	المانيا		Germany
الجيزة	Aljyzp	Giza		الجيزه	Egypt
حيفا	HyfA	Haifa		حيفة	Israel
جدة	jdp	Jeddah	جدّة	جده	Saudi Arabia
القدس	Alqds	Jerusalem			Israel
المنامة	AlmnAmp	Manama		المنامه	Bahrain
مكة	mkp	Mecca		مكه	Saudi Arabia
نابلس	nAbls	Nablus			Palestinian Territory
نانجينغ	nAnjyng	Nanjing			China
بالو ألتو	bAlw >ltw	Palo Alto	بالو التو, بالو آلتو		USA
الرياض	AlryAD	Riyadh	الرّياض		Saudi Arabia

4. Place Name Variants

The table below shows various orthographic variants and common errors for االإسكندرية, the Egyptian city of Alexandria, along with Google occurrences (there are many other variants involving partial vocalization). Our databases are now being expanded to systematically include all orthographic variants and errors based on statistical analysis of Arabic orthography as it currently occurs in corpora, and often include the fully vocalized versions as well (see Database of Arabic Proper Nouns for a sample).

Our Arabic place names are carefully proofread to ensure strict adherence to the complex rules of hamza orthography, something which is often ignored outside of publications of the highest editorial standards. The result of this strict editorial policy is that we can provide not only the linguistically correct standard MSA version, but also all common non-standard and incorrect versions as well, carefully flagged to distinguish between them, as shown in the table below.

In addition to the above, our database contains many other variants, such as those with partial and full vocalization, covering all actual and potential variants. The full set of Alexandria variants includes 35 entries.