title: Proposed framework for the evaluation of standalone corpora processing systems: an application to Arabic corpora.
abstract: Despite the accessibility of numerous online corpora, students and researchers engaged in the fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP), corpus linguistics, and language learning and teaching may encounter situations in which they need to develop their own corpora. Several commercial and free standalone corpora processing systems are available to process such corpora. In this study, we first propose a framework for the evaluation of standalone corpora processing systems and then use it to evaluate seven freely available systems. The proposed framework considers the usability, functionality, and performance of the evaluated systems while taking into consideration their suitability for Arabic corpora. While the results show that most of the evaluated systems exhibited comparable usability scores, the scores for functionality and performance were substantially different with respect to support for the Arabic language and N-grams profile generation. The results of our evaluation will help potential users of the evaluated systems to choose the system that best meets their needs. More importantly, the results will help the developers of the evaluated systems to enhance their systems and developers of new corpora processing systems by providing them with a reference framework.
authors.affiliation: King AbdulAziz City for Science and Technology, Riyadh 11442, Saudi Arabia.
authors.forename: Abdulmohsen
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Al-Thubaity
authors.affiliation: King Saud University, Riyadh 12372, Saudi Arabia.
authors.forename: Hend
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-7328-4935
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Al-Khalifa
authors.affiliation: King Saud University, Riyadh 12372, Saudi Arabia.
authors.forename: Reem
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Alqifari
authors.affiliation: King AbdulAziz City for Science and Technology, Riyadh 11442, Saudi Arabia.
authors.forename: Manal
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-4348-1903
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Almazrua
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D018643:Arab World; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D012984:Software