Arabic Plurals

The CJKI Database of Arabic Plurals (DAP), the first truly modern, fully up-to-date database covering both regular and irregular Arabic plurals. DAP includes various grammatical attributes such as part-of-speech, collectivity codes, gender codes, and full vocalization.

This database is now available for use in software development, machine translation, and Arabic language education. For language learners and language processing software alike, the irregular, or broken, plurals present one of the greatest challenges in learning and processing.

In fact, the majority of noun plurals in Arabic are actually irregular or “broken plurals”. These morphologically irregular plurals are distinct in that they are not formed with regular plural suffixes. Instead, they are formed by modifying the vowels of the vowel-consonant pattern (CV templates) of the singular form. DAP covers over 3000 entries.

DAP has been assembled by a team of specialists in Arabic grammar through meticulous attention and research over a period of many years. This ensures accuracy and avoids the errors found in other works. In an era in which accurate processing of Arabic text is critical, this database represents a major step forward for natural language processing, machine translation, lexicography, and pedagogy.