Recent computational work on Arabic dialect identification has focused primarily on building and annotating corpora written in Arabic script. Arabic dialects however also appear written in Roman script, especially in social media. This paper describes our recent work developing tweet corpora and a token-level classifier that identifies a romanized Arabic dialect and distinguishes it from French...

Tunisian Arabic is a dialect of the Arabic language spoken in Tunisia. Tunisian Arabic is an under-resourced language. It has neither a standard orthography nor large collections of written text and dictionaries. Actually, there is no strict separation between Modern Standard Arabic, the official language of the government, media and education, and Tunisian Arabic; the two exist on a continuum ...

The research focus in our paper is twofold: (a) to examine the extent to which simple Arabic sentence structures comply with the Government and Binding Theory (GB), and (b) to implement a simple Arabic Context Free Grammar (CFG) parser to analyze input sentence structures to improve some Arabic Natural Language Processing (ANLP) Applications. Here we present a parser that employs Chomsky’s Gove...

We present a free, Java-based library named “AraNLP” that covers various Arabic text preprocessing tools. Although a good number of tools for processing Arabic text already exist, integration and compatibility problems continually occur. AraNLP is an attempt to gather most of the vital Arabic text preprocessing tools into one library that can be accessed easily by integrating or accurately adap...

Most research in Arabic roots extraction focuses on removing affixes from Arabic words. This process adds processing overhead and may remove non-affix letters, which leads to the extraction of incorrect roots. This paper advises a new approach to dealing with this issue by introducing a new algorithm for extracting Arabic words’ roots. The proposed algorithm, which is called the Word Substring ...

The Moriscos, the Mohanmedans turned "new Christians" of sixteenth-century Spain, were expelled from their homeland by royal decree in 1609. Dr. Garcia Ballester, in this thought-provoking study, shows how from an organized medical system with diplomas and licences, medicine among this oppressed and largely peasant minority came to be practised by unlicensed healers relying on traditional, ofte...

We present annotation guidelines and a web-based annotation framework developed as part of an effort to create a manually annotated Arabic corpus of errors and corrections for various text types. Such a corpus will be invaluable for developing Arabic error correction tools, both for training models and as a gold standard for evaluating error correction algorithms. We summarize the guidelines we...

In this paper we address the following questions from our experience of the last two and a half years in developing a large-scale corpus of Arabic text annotated for morphological information, part-of-speech, English gloss, and syntactic structure: (a) How did we ‘leapfrog’ through the stumbling blocks of both methodology and training in setting up the Penn Arabic Treebank (ATB) annotation? (b)...