AWN-similarity: Towards developing free open-source frameworks for measuring Arabic semantic similarity under Windows / Linux operating systems

Abstract

Arabic is a highly systematic language where its words exhibit elegant and rigorous logic. The field of Arabic word semantic similarity becomes more challenging due to its higher complexity and subtlety. This research is concerned with investigating the development of free open-source frameworks containing packages to calculate the semantic similarity between two Arabic words or concepts. These packages are known as AWN-ConceptSimilarity and AWN-WordSimilarity. The developed packages implement seven semantic similarity algorithms. One of these algorithms was proposed for Arabic and the rest were proposed for English where successfully adapted to Arabic using an Arabic lexical database, Arabic wordnet.

The functionality of the developed packages is validated using two-word similarity benchmarks datasets previously produced for Arabic. The results of the validation process indicate that the developed frameworks represent an important contribution to the Arabic semantic similarity field. Moreover, the developed packages are reliable to use and embed them with Arabic researchers' projects for improving or comparing their methodologies.