Arabic Compatible Word Analysers for Corpus Research: An Affordance Based Critical Review and Evaluation Framework
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.65150/EP-jsshrs/V2E10/2026-08Keywords:
Arabic corpus linguistics, word analysers, affordance theory, concordance, morphological analysis, reproducibilityAbstract
Arabic corpus researchers need software that can transform written text into linguistically interpretable evidence. However, displaying Arabic characters, retrieving orthographic words and identifying morphological units are different capabilities, and their conflation can obscure the conditions under which corpus findings remain defensible. This article develops an affordance based critical review of Arabic compatible word analysers through a synthesis of published software studies and current developer documentation. It examines AntConc, WordSmith Tools, LancsBox, Sketch Engine, aConCorde, the Buckwalter Arabic Morphological Analyzer, the Standard Arabic Morphological Analyzer, MADAMIRA and CAMeL Tools. The review draws selectively on developer documentation, resource catalogues and foundational publications rather than reporting an experimental benchmark or systematic review. Its central problem concerns the relationship between documented software capabilities and valid analytical action in Arabic corpus research. The proposed framework distinguishes script access, linguistic representation, contextual retrieval, statistical comparison and reproducibility, with researcher competence and corpus variety treated as conditions of affordance actualisation. The analysis indicates that concordancers and morphological processors offer complementary capabilities rather than interchangeable solutions. It proposes a layered workflow and a controlled evaluation design through which future studies can test retrieval accuracy, segmentation decisions and the stability of corpus interpretations. The contribution is a theoretically grounded basis for software selection and evaluation that connects technical functions to research questions without assuming that tool availability establishes analytical validity.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Zainur Rijal Abdul Razak, Rosni Samah (Author)
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