Database of Arabic Place Names in Arabic

Overview

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. The CJK Dictionary Institute is engaged in the development and continuous expansion of comprehensive lexical databases for CJK languages and Arabic. This document describes our Database of Arabic Place Names.

Carefully proofread and validated

It is important to note that although there are 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.

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.

Data sample