The written form of the Arabic language, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), differs in a nontrivial manner from the various spoken regional dialects of Arabic – the true “native languages” of Arabic speakers. Those dialects, in turn, differ quite a bit from each other. However, due to MSA’s prevalence in written form, almost all Arabic datasets have predominantly MSA content. In this article, we des...

In this paper, we present the details of the Arabic Semantic Labeling task. We describe some of the features of Arabic that are relevant for the task. The task comprises two subtasks: Arabic word sense disambiguation and Arabic semantic role labeling. The task focuses on modern standard Arabic.

In the context of arabic Information Retrieval Systems (IRS) guided by arabic ontology and to enable those systems to better respond to user requirements, this paper aims to representing documents and queries by the best concepts extracted from Arabic Wordnet. Identified concepts belonging to Arabic WordNet synsets are extracted from documents and queries, and those having a single sense are ex...

Arabic character recognition of handwriting is addressed. A novel approach for the Arabic Character Recognition is presented based on statistical analysis of a typical Arabic text is presented. Results showed that the sub-word in Arabic language is the basic pictorial block rather than the word. The method of approximate stroke sequence is applied for the recognition of some Arabic characters i...

This paper discusses issues regarding the influence of culture on Arabic Websites. Arabic Websites from three countries serve as an initial sample for this study. Do the Websites of Arabic countries reflect their culture? How specifically? Do they share attitudes about design? Can an Arabic designer achieve what users in other cultures need and want? What are differences reflected in the differ...

Online Arabic content is growing very rapidly, with unmatched growth in Arabic structured resources. Systems that perform standard Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as Named Entity Disambiguation (NED) struggle to deliver decent quality due to the lack of rich Arabic entity repositories. In this paper, we introduce EDRAK, an automatically generated comprehensive Arabic entity-centric...

This paper presents a preliminary study of intra-speaker and inter-speaker variability in speech production and perception with an inter-dialect investigation of acoustic vocalic space according to different phonological systems. This work aims at providing an analytic study based on individual data that might account for individual strategies. We have studied variability in vowel production an...

We present CALIMAGLF, a Gulf Arabic morphological analyzer currently covering over 2,600 verbal lemmas. We describe in detail the process of building the analyzer starting from phonetic dictionary entries to fully inflected orthographic paradigms and associated lexicon and orthographic variants. We evaluate the coverage of CALIMAGLF against Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic analyzers o...

In TREC-10 the Berkeley group participated only in the English-Arabic cross-language retrieval (CLIR) track. One Arabic monolingual run and four English-Arabic cross-language runs were submitted. Our approach to the cross-language retrieval was to translate the English topics into Arabic using online EnglishArabic bilingual dictionaries and machine translation software. The five official runs a...

A comparison between the performance of Latin and Arabic handwritten digits recognition problems is presented. The performance of ten different classifiers is tested on two similar Arabic and Latin handwritten digits databases. The analysis shows that Arabic handwritten digits recognition problem is easier than that of Latin digits. This is because the interclass difference in case of Latin dig...