Arabic Place Names

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. 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.

CJKI’s Database of Arabic Place Names (DAPNA) provides worldwide coverage, is accurate, and has been validated using state-of-the-art techniques in computational lexicography. For example, the data has been carefully proofread to ensure adherence to the complex rules of hamza orthography, something which is often ignored.

In addition, DAPNA includes common non-standard and incorrectly spelled variants of Arabic place names.