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Vicav – Viennese Corpus of Arabic Varieties

The Vienna Corpus of Arabic Varieties (VICAV) was set up with two main purposes in mind: to serve as a virtual research platform targeting the particular needs of Arabic dialectology and to serve as a test bed for newly developed text technological methodologies and tools.
As part of these efforts, it was designed as a means to promote the efficient exchange of ideas and experiences in an active international community. Being located at the border between areal and corpus linguistics, the aim is to gather varying digital language resources for a number of different localities. The description of the different varieties will hinge on language profiles, concise and uniformly structured form sheets that offer information on the research history, available literature, salient grammatical features etc. of particular varieties. VICAV makes accessible bibliographies, dictionaries, glossaries, and different types of transcribed texts.
The project aims at providing a platform of exchange for a scientific community which is increasingly producing digital data but still lacks the infrastructure to make it widely available. The project is conducted as a co-operation between the Department of Oriental Studies of the University of Vienna and the ACDH. It is also part of CLARIN-AT’s project bundle aiming at more language resources for under-resourced linguistic varieties. The ACDH’s research interests in this project are related to issues of digital lexicography, visualisation of digital language resources in a multilingual environment and the application of (de-facto) standards such as TEI, LMF and/or MAF in the creation of digital language resources.

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