Book Reviews: Arabic Computational Morphology: Knowledge-Based and Empirical Methods by Abdelhadi Soudi, Antal van den Bosch, and Neumann, Günter (editors)

The past few decades have witnessed an increased interest in Arabic natural language processing, and in particular computational morphology. In the early 1990s one had to contend with a number of papers that proposed methodologies to handle the various complexities of Arabic morphology, most of which had little implementation associated with them, with the sole notable exception of the works of Beesley, Buckwalter, and others.1 Today the field has grown, and as this book illustrates, more approaches and implementations are emerging. The book begins with a preface by Richard Sproat, briefly outlining the early history of Arabic computational morphology. The main body of the book is arranged in four parts. Part I (Chapters 1–3) consists of three introductory chapters. Parts II (Chapters 4–7) and III (Chapters 8–11) present various knowledge-based and empirical approaches, respectively. Finally, Part IV (Chapters 12–15) demonstrates how Arabic morphology is integrated in larger applications, namely, information retrieval (IR), and machine translation (MT). A three-page index lists some grammatical terms and system names.