Abstract Arabic  is  a  Semitic  language  spoken  by  millions  of  people  in  20  different  countries.  However,  not  much   work  has  been done in the field of online dictionaries or le xical resources. WordNet is an example of a lexical  resource that has not been  yet developed to its full extent for Arabic.  WordNe t, a lexical database developed by Professor  George  Miller and his  team at  Princeton  University,  has  seen  life  20  years  ago.  E ver  since  then,  it  has  proved  to  be  widely  successful  and  extremely  necessary  for  today’s  demands.  Accordingly,  the  mot ivation  of  developing  an  Arabic  WordNet  (AWN)  becam e  strong.  This  project  addresses  the  nominal  part  of  WordNet  as  th e  first  step  towards  the  construction  of  a  comprehensive  AWN.  The  nominal part means nouns as a part of speech .  

References

[1] Abu Absi S., The Arabic Language, Glossary of Linguistic Terms, available at: http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguist icTerms, last visited 2015.

[2] Black W. and El Kateb S., A Prototype English Arabic Dictionary Based on WordNet, in Proceedings of the 2nd Global WordNet Conference , Czech Republic, pp. 67 74, 2004.

[3] Black W., Elkateb S., Rodriguez H., Alkhalifa M., Vossen P., Pease A., and Fellbaum C., Introducing the Arabic WordNet Project, available at: http://vossen.info/docs/2006/arabic.pdf, last visited 2006.

[4] Diab M., Feasibility of Bootstrapping an Arabic WordNet Leveraging Parallel Corpora and an English WordNet, available at: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~mdiab/papers/boot strappingArabicWN.pdf, last visited 2004.

[5] Educational Uses of WordNet. READER: A Lexical Aid, available at: http://wordnet.princeton.edu/reader.

[6] Elberrichi Z. and Abidi K., Arabic Text Categorization: A comparative Study of Different Representation Modes, the International Arab Journal of Information Technology , vol. 9, no. 5, pp. 465 470, 2012.

[7] Elkateb S., Black, W., Rodriguez H, Alkhalifa, M., Vossen, P., Pease, A. and Fellbaum, C., Building a WordNet for Arabic, available at: http://nlp.lsi.upc.edu/papers/fellbaum06.pdf, last visited 2015. 626 The International Arab Journal of Inf ormation Technology, Vol. 12, No. 6A, 2015

[8] Fellbaum C., English Verbs as a Semantic Net, International Journal of Lexicography , vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 278 301, 1990.

[9] Fellbaum C., Gross D., and Miller K., Adjectives in WordNet, International Journal of Lexicography , vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 265 277, 1990.

[10] Fellbaum C., WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database , MIT Press, 1998.

[11] Mihaltz M. and Proszeky G., Results and Evaluation of Hungarian Nominal WordNet v1.0, in Proceedings of the 2nd Global WordNet Conference , Brno, pp. 175 180, 2004.

[12] Miller G., Beckwith R., Fellbaum C., Gross D., and Miller K., Introduction to WordNet: An On line Lexical Database, International Journal of Lexicography , vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 235 244, 1990.

[13] Miller G., Nouns in WordNet: A Lexical Inheritance System, International Journal of Lexicography , vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 245 264, 1990.

[14] Morato J., Marzal M., Llorens J., and Moreiro J., WordNet Applications, in Proceedings of Global WordNet Conference , Brno, pp. 270 278, 2004.

[15] Niles I. and Pease A., Linking Lexicons and Ontologies: Mapping WordNet to the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology, in Proceedings of International Conference on Information and Knowledge Engineering , pp 412 416, 2003.

[16] Visual Thesaurus., available at: http://www.darwinmag.com/read/buzz/column.ht ml?ArticleID=576.

[17] Vossen P., EuroWordNet General Documentation, available at: http://wordnet.princeton.edu/man/wnstats.7WN

[18] Wintner S. and Yona S., Resources for Processing Hebrew, available at: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~alavie/Sem MT wshp/ Wintner+Yona_presentation.pdf, last visited 2003.

[19] WordWeb., International English Thesaurus and Dictionary for Windows, available at: http://wordweb.info, last visited 2015 . Hamza Zidoum received his Ms, and PhD degrees from the University of France Comt , France. He is a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science in Sultan Qaboos University since 2002. He is the head of artificial intelligence research group. Fatma Al@Rasbi graduated from the Department of Computer Science Department, Sultan Qaboos University. Muna Al@Awfi graduated from the Department of Computer Science Department, Sultan Qaboos University.