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...

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...

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 focuses on the automatic extraction of Arabic Named Entities (NEs) from the Arabic Wikipedia (AWP), their automatic attachment to Arabic WordNet (AWN) and their automatic link to Princeton's English WordNet (PWN). We briefly report on the current status of AWN, focusing on its rather limited NE coverage. Our proposal of automatic extension is then presented, applied and evaluated. Ke...

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...

In order to construct a generic grammatical resource for Arabic language, we have chosen to develop an Arabic grammar based on TAG formalism. Our choice is, especially, justified by complementarities that we have noticed between Arabic syntax and this grammatical formalism. This paper consists of two comparative studies. The first is between a set of unification grammars. The second is between ...

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...

In this paper, we present a generic Optical Character Recognition system for Arabic script languages called Nabocr. Nabocr uses OCR approaches specific for Arabic script recognition. Performing recognition on Arabic script text is relatively more difficult than Latin text due to the nature of Arabic script, which is cursive and context sensitive. Moreover, Arabic script has different writing st...