Arabic Computational Linguistics

Arabic is one of the major languages of the world, spoken natively by 330 million people and used in prayer daily by 1.4 billion. Yet it is a language where most native speakers use three forms, Classical for prayer, Modern Standard for news and books, and a local dialect for everyday conversation.

Work on Arabic computational linguistics began in the late 1970's and early 1980's in the United States, in Europe, and in the Middle East and has been driven in part by the enormous amounts of Arabic data, both structured and unstructured, that Urgently needs to be processed and understood. Many companies, governments and search engines posses enormous amounts of Arabic text and recorded speech and need to distinguish the relevant from irrelevant information with speed and accuracy. Developing Arabic computational linguistics tools to facilitate this task is crucial to compensate for the lack of human expertise and because such tools are much faster and less costly.

This book documents the impressive efforts and the remarkable results in Arabic computational linguistics during the past few years. To do this Ali Farghaly has gathered together papers from many of the most prominent people in the filed.