ended with a four-year period that saw six different governments. Indeed, between 1997 and 2005, four of nine presidents in Latin America who were removed through irregular procedures were in Ecuador. Sociologist Leon Zamosc calls Ecuador “one of the most, if not the most, unstable country in Latin America.” At the same time, the Ecuadorian Indian movement made important gains in the last decad...

This paper describes our efforts to build an Arabic ASR system with web-crawled resources. We first describe the processing done to handle Arabic text in general and more particularly to cope with the high number of different phonetic transcriptions associated to a typical Arabic word. Then, we present our experiments to build acoustic models using only audio data found in the web, in particula...

This paper investigates the unique pharyngeal and uvular consonants of Arabic from the point of view of automatic speech recognition (ASR). 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 discussed. ...

Segmentation of clitics has been shown to improve accuracy on a variety of Arabic NLP tasks. However, state-of-the-art Arabic word segmenters are either limited to formal Modern Standard Arabic, performing poorly on Arabic text featuring dialectal vocabulary and grammar, or rely on linguistic knowledge that is hand-tuned for each dialect. We extend an existing MSA segmenter with a simple domain...

Arabic is a language of rich and complex morphology. The nature and peculiarity of Arabic make its morphological and phonological rules confusing for second language learners (SLLs). The conjugation of Arabic verbs is central to the formulation of an Arabic sentence because of its richness of form and meaning. In this paper, we address issues related to the morphological analysis of ill formed ...

Hebrew and Arabic are Semitic languages with a similar morphological structure and orthographies that differ in visual complexity. Two experiments explored the interaction of the characteristics of orthography and hemispheric abilities on lateralized versions of a letter-matching task (Experiment 1) and a global-local task (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, native Hebrew readers and native Arabic...

Most Arabic natural language processing tools and resources are developed to serve Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which is the official written language in the Arab World. Some Dialectal Arabic varieties, notably Egyptian Arabic, have received some attention lately and have a growing collection of resources that include annotated corpora and morphological analyzers and taggers. Gulf Arabic, howe...

Text readability refers to the ability of the reader to understand and comprehend a given text. In this research, we present our approach to develop an automatic readability index for the Arabic language: Automatic Arabic Readability Index (AARI), using factor analysis. Our results are based on more than 1196 Arabic texts extracted from the Jordanian curriculum in the subjects of: Arabic langua...

We present our correction annotation guidelines to create a manually corrected nonnative (L2) Arabic corpus. We develop our approach by extending an L1 large-scale Arabic corpus and its manual corrections, to include manually corrected non-native Arabic learner essays. Our overarching goal is to use the annotated corpus to develop components for automatic detection and correction of language er...