This article presents neurolinguistic data on word stress perception in Cairene Arabic, in comparison to previous results on German and Turkish. The main goal is to investigate how central properties of stress systems such as predictability of stress and metrical structure are reflected in the prosodic processing of words. Cairene Arabic is a language with a regular foot-based word stress syste...

Arabic script is naturally cursive and unconstrained and, as a result, an automatic recognition of its handwriting is a challenging problem. The analysis of Arabic script is further complicated in comparison to Latin script due to obligatory dots/stokes that are placed above or below most letters. In this paper, we introduce a new approach that performs online Arabic word recognition on a conti...

Arabic language is very rich in derivations, vocabulary, and grammatical structures. The problem of determining the correct meaning of a word in a non-vowelized Arabic sentence is not a trivial task since Arabic is very rich in the polysemy phenomena. This paper attempts to reveal the word sense ambiguity, by building a semantic parser powered by a statistical semantic analyzer, which may aid i...

We describe the CMU submission for the 2014 shared task on language identification in code-switched data. We participated in all four language pairs: Spanish–English, Mandarin–English, Nepali–English, and Modern Standard Arabic–Arabic dialects. After describing our CRF-based baseline system, we discuss three extensions for learning from unlabeled data: semi-supervised learning, word embeddings,...

This chapter presents an adaptation of existing techniques in Arabic morphology by leveraging corpus statistics to make them suitable for Information Retrieval (IR). The adaptation resulted in the development of Sebawai, an shallow Arabic morphological analyzer, and Al-Stem, an Arabic light stemmer. Both were used to produce Arabic index terms for Arabic experimentation. Sebawai is concerned wi...

This contribution describes an Arabic-English parallel word aligned treebank corpus from the Linguistic Data Consortium that is currently under production. Herein we primarily focus on efforts required to assemble the package and instructions for using it. It was crucial that word alignment be performed on tokens produced during treebanking to ensure cohesion and greater utility of the corpus. ...

The purpose of this article is to determine the phonemic status of [h] and [ʔ] in the Sistani dialect of Miyankangi. Auditory tests applied to the relevant data show that [ʔ] occurs mainly in word-initial position, where it stands in free variation with Ø. The only place where [h] is heard is in Arabic and Persian loanwords, and only in the pronunciation of some speakers who are educated and/or...

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 ...

This paper presents a hybrid approach to the enhancement of English to Arabic statistical machine translation quality. Machine Translation has been defined as the process that utilizes computer software to translate text from one natural language to another. Arabic, as a morphologically rich language, is a highly flexional language, in that the same root can lead to various forms according to i...

complies with the regulations of the University and meets the accepted standards with respect to originality and quality. Word segmentation is an important task for many methods that are related to document understanding especially word spotting and word recognition. Several approaches of word segmentation have been proposed for Latin-based languages while a few of them have been introduced for...