Dialectal Arabic (DA) refers to the day-to-day vernaculars spoken in the Arab world. DA lives side-by-side with the official language, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). DA differs from MSA on all levels of linguistic representation, from phonology and morphology to lexicon and syntax. Unlike MSA, DA has no standard orthography since there are no Arabic dialect academies, nor is there a large edited...

This paper reports results of a workshop on the design of electronic content for users with Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLD), particularly Arabic dyslexics. First we shed some light on the nature of the Arabic language and discuss features that account for the unique needs of Arabic users with reading disorders. Then we present recommendations for accessible web design for Arabic content i...

Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging is a key step in many NLP algorithms. However, tweets are difficult to POS tag because they are short, are not always written maintaining formal grammar and proper spelling, and abbreviations are often used to overcome their restricted lengths. Arabic tweets also show a further range of linguistic phenomena such as usage of different dialects, romanised Arabic and b...

The most important reference work for pharmacology in the Islamic Era is Materia Medica by Dioscorides, the Greek scientist. It’s also named fi-hayuli-al-Tibb in the Islamic era. There are several different translation of this book in Arabic and Persian. In this article I’m going to introduce a manuscript of one the Arabic translation of this book which hasn’t been mentioned in any bibliographi...

As the number of Arabic corpora is constantly increasing, there is an obvious and growing need for concordancing software for corpus search and analysis that supports as many features as possible of the Arabic language, and provides users with a greater number of functions. This paper evaluates seven existing corpus search and analysis tools based on eight criteria which seem to be the most ess...

In this paper, we implement a multilingual Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system for Arabic-English Translation. Arabic Text can be categorized into standard and dialectal Arabic. These two forms of Arabic differ significantly. Different mono-lingual and multi-lingual hybrid SMT approaches are compared. Mono-lingual systems do always result in better translation accuracy in one Arabic fo...

In this paper we investigate the possibility of creating a PoS tagger for Modern Standard Arabic by integrating open-source tools. In particular a morphological analyser, used in the disambiguation process with a PoS tagger trained on classical Arabic. The investigation shows the scarcity of open-source tools and resources, which complicated the integration process. Among the problems are diffe...

Parsing Arabic sentences is a difficult task; the difficulties come from several sources. One is that sentences are long and complex, the other difficulties come from the sentence structure. The syntactic structure of sentence parts may be missing, taking different orders of words and phrases. The present work aims to develop an Arabic Parser. A new parser has been developed with the aim of ana...

Parsing of Arabic sentences is a necessary mechanism for many natural language processing applications such as machine translation; question answering, knowledge extraction and information retrieval. In this study, we present a top-down chart parser for parsing simple Arabic sentences, including nominal and verbal sentences within specific domain Arabic grammar. We used the Context Free Grammar...

This paper investigates the unique pharyngeal and uvular consonants of Arabic from the automatic speech recognition (ASR) point of view. Comparisons of the recognition error rates for these phonemes are analyzed in five experiments that involve different combinations of native and non-native Arabic speakers. The most three confusing consonants for every investigated consonant are uncovered and ...