MOALLEMCorpus: A Large-Scale Multimedia Corpus for Children Education of Arabic Vocabularies

Abstract

The education of children with learning difficulties is a challenging task especially during COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, these children need to go regularly to specialized school, receive focused education, and interact with teachers to learn. Instructors allocate important time to teach them and use different approaches including, attractive stories, tangible photos, physical plays, sites visit, awards and gifts. However, these modes of education become nowadays very hard to achieve as instructors are teaching from homes or offices through the Internet. They cannot have face-to-face meetings with children in classrooms. The major issue is how to find the necessary materials to teach them the new Arabic vocabularies and explain their meanings in an effective manner. Instructors can use textbooks, online libraries and search engines looking for Arabic educational resources while most of them are in English or in other western languages. The process is very long, time consuming and does not fill-in the gap. We propose to build a new educational large-scale multimedia Arabic corpus that provides thousands of vocabularies and chunks associated with best representative images. The instructors can use the bimodal corpus directly during the learning sessions to explain new Arabic words through images. It currently covers the animals’ domain and contains thousands of well-structured and interconnected entities. Instructors can collaborate in enhancing the corpus by adding new materials through a web-based platform and build then rich source of learning materials.