This paper investigates the role of temporal and non-temporal cues in the distinction between singleton and geminate medial consonants in Lebanese Arabic. Twenty male and female speakers were recorded producing a word-list with medial singleton and geminate voiced and voiceless stops and fricatives. Vowels preceding and following the medial consonant were /a/ or /aː/. A range of acoustic measur...

In the current study we aim at exploiting discourse structure of Arabic text to automatically finding answers to non-factoid questions ("Why" and "How to"). Our method is based on Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) that many studies have shown to be a very effective approach for many computational linguistics applications such as (text generation, text summarization and machine translation). For...

This paper presents a novel approach for Arabic root generation and lexicon development. The approach provides three algorithms; in the first algorithm Arabic word root is generated using the concept of permutation and combination, the root generator algorithm generates roots by applying permutations to the Arabic alphabetic letters. Then, the second algorithm is used for developing difference ...

Electronic Document Management (EDM) technology is being widely adopted as it makes for the efficient routing and retrieval of documents. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is an important front end for such technology. Excellent OCR now exists for Latin based languages, but there are few systems that read Arabic, which limits the penetration of EDM into Arabicspeaking countries. In developing...

1. Some Extended Arabic characters are typographical variants of characters already adequately covered by the corresponding Basic Arabic Characters; 2. 0626 ARABIC LETTER YEH WITH HAMZA ABOVE is actually a representation form of two nominal characters: 06D5 ARABIC LETTER AE followed by 0621 ARABIC LETTER HAMZA; 3. The graphemes for the aspirated phonemes of Urdu should be added; 06BE ARABIC LET...

Arabic script is the third most widely used writing system after Latin and Chinese, but research in Arabic Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is still nascent in comparison to Latin script. Arabic script is inherently cursive in nature, therefore techniques developed for other scripts are generally inappropriate for Arabic. In this paper we present recent progress in the field of Handwritten A...

Arabic morphology poses special challenges to computational natural language processing systems. Its rich morphology and the highly complex word formation process of roots and patterns make computational approaches to Arabic very challenging. In this paper we present an approach for morphological analysis and generation of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Our approach is based on Arabic morphologi...

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...