This paper surveys some of the literature pertaining to searching and retrieving OCR’ed printed documents with emphasis on Arabic documents. It examines peculiarities of Arabic morphology, orthography, retrieval, word clustering, display, OCR, and error correction. The paper surveys existing evaluation test-beds for retrieval of Arabic OCR texts. Lastly, it concludes with possible directions fo...

Judeo-Arabic is a group of Arabic-based languages used by Jews for many centuries, which like some other Jewish languages (for example,Yiddish), is written in the Hebrew alphabet. Many of the great Jewish literary works of the Middle Ages were written in Judeo-Arabic. A large quantity of additional Judeo-Arabic text has become available with the digitization of manuscripts found in the Cairo Ge...

The Columbia Arabic Treebank (CATiB) is a database of syntactic analyses of Arabic sentences. CATiB contrasts with previous approaches to Arabic treebanking in its emphasis on speed with some constraints on linguistic richness. Two basic ideas inspire the CATiB approach: no annotation of redundant information and using representations and terminology inspired by traditional Arabic syntax. We de...

The Arabic language has far richer systems of inflection and derivation than English which has very little morphology. This morphology difference causes a large gap between the vocabulary sizes in any given parallel training corpus. Segmentation of inflected Arabic words is a way to smooth its highly morphological nature. In this paper, we describe some statistically and linguistically motivate...

As a part of multi-media support system for Arabic e-learning, some vehicle should be provided for training students to pronounce Arabic text themselves. Since the Arabic alphabet is phonetic, it seems a good idea to transliterate Arabic into Roman, the most popular language, but there exists a big gap between Arabic and Roman besides a difference between their alphabets; scripting directions. ...

This paper reports results of a workshop on the design of electronic content for users with Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLD), particularly Arabic dyslexics. First we shed some light on the nature of the Arabic language and discuss features that account for the unique needs of Arabic users with reading disorders. Then we present recommendations for accessible web design for Arabic content i...

The integration of ethnical minorities has been a hotly discussed topic in the political, societal, and economic debate. Persistent discrimination of ethnical minorities can hinder successful integration. Given that unequal access to investment and financing opportunities can cause social and economic disparities due to inferior economic prospects, we conducted a field experiment on ethnical di...

This paper describes and proposes an efficient and effective framework for the design and development of a speaker-independent continuous automatic Arabic speech recognition system based on a phonetically rich and balanced speech corpus. The speech corpus contains a total of 415 sentences recorded by 40 (20 male and 20 female) Arabic native speakers from 11 different Arab countries representing...

The use of OCR in postal services is not yet universal and there are still many countries that process mail sorting manually. Automated Arabic/Indian numeral Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems for Postal services are being used in some countries, but still there are errors during the mail sorting process, thus causing a reduction in efficiency. The need to investigate fast and efficien...