Arabic script-based languages deserve to be studied linguistically
Martin Kay · 2004
Arabic script-based languages are attracting increased attention for reasons that are regrettably far from their intrinsic linguistic interest. At the same time, statistical and corpus-based approaches to language processing are acquiring such dominance that it is becoming difficult for the advocates of other methods even to receive a hearing. I will argue that this is an alarming trend against which computational linguists, and especially those studying these languages, should resist with great determination. My argument for this position rests on the following observations: