Towards Concept Extraction for Ontologies on Arabic language

Abstract

Ontology is one of the most popular representation model used for knowledge representation, sharing and reusing. The Arabic language has complex morphological, grammatical, and semantic aspects. Due to complexity of Arabic language, automatic Arabic terminology extraction is difficult. In addition, concept extraction from Arabic documents has been challenging research area, because, as opposed to term extraction, concept extraction are more domain related and more selective. Manual concept extraction is time-consuming process and not objective. Automatic concept extraction methods often analyze a document to determine the important domain terms, which can be a single word or multi-word term. In the literature, there are many approaches, techniques and algorithms used for term extraction. In this paper, we deal with fundamental layers involved in ontology construction from Arabic text: extracting the relevant domain terminology from a text and discovering domain concepts. Moreover, we study the problem of Arabic concept extraction from domain texts and provide a comparative review of the existing Arabic term extraction approaches highlighting the challenges posed by Arabic language characteristics. Despite the efforts to combine methods on Arabic term extraction, the field is still open for new development. The paper also proposes a future study to address this issue.