Built on the basis of the methods developed for Princeton WordNet and EuroWordNet, Arabic WordNet (AWN) has been an interesting project which combines WordNet structure compliance with Arabic particularities. In this paper, some AWN shortcomings related to coverage and usability are addressed. The use of AWN in question/answering (Q/A) helped us to deeply evaluate the resource from an experience-based perspective. Accordingly, an enrichment of AWN was built by semi-automatically extending its content. Indeed, existing approaches and/or resources developed for other languages were adapted and used for AWN. The experiments conducted in Arabic Q/A have shown an improvement of both AWN coverage as well as usability. Concerning coverage, a great amount of named entities extracted from YAGO were connected with corresponding AWN synsets. Also, a significant number of new verbs and nouns (including Broken Plural forms) were added. In terms of usability, thanks to the use of AWN, the performance for the AWN-based Q/A application registered an overall improvement with respect to the following three measures: accuracy (+9.27 % improvement), mean reciprocal rank (+3.6 improvement) and number of answered questions (+12.79 % improvement).

We describe an experiment in developing a first version of WordNet for Iraqi Arabic starting from Arabic WordNet (for Modern Standard Arabic), Princeton WordNet (for English) and a bidirectional English-Iraqi Arabic dictionary. The resulting initial version of the target WordNet so-constructed was made available to human experts in Iraqi Arabic for correction and evaluation.

The last decade had known a great interest in Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. This interest is due to the prominent importance of this 6th most wide-spread language in the world with more than 350 million native speakers. Curre