Introduction to the special issue on Arabic NLP: Current state and future challenges
Hend Suliman Al-Khalifa · Journal of King Saud University - Computer and Information Sciences · 2014
Introduction to the special issue on Arabic NLP: Current state and future challenges Overview of the articles Arabic natural language processing (NLP) is still in its initial stage compared to the work in English and other languages.NLP is made possible by the collaboration of many disciplines including computer science, linguistics, mathematics, psychology and artificial intelligence.The results of which is highly beneficial to many applications such as Machine Translation, Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, Text Summarization and Question Answering.This special issue of the Journal of King Saud University -Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) synthesizes current research in the field of Arabic NLP.A total of 56 submissions was received, 11 of which were finally accepted for this special issue.Each accepted paper has gone through three rounds of reviews, each round with two to three reviewers.The content of this special issue covers different topics such as: Dialectal Arabic Morphology, Arabic Corpus, Transliteration, Annotation, Discourse Relations, Sentiment Lexicon, Arabic named entities, Arabic Treebank, Text Summarization, Ontological Relations and Authorship attribution.The following is a brief summary of each of the main articles in this issue.''arTenTen: Arabic Corpus and Word Sketches'' by Nizar Habash et al. presented a web-crawled corpus of Arabic, gathered in 2012.arTenTen comprises 5.8 billion words.A chunk of it has been lemmatized and POS-tagged with the MADA tools and has then been loaded into Sketch Engine, a leading corpus query tool, where it is open for all to use.We have also created 'word sketches': one-page, automatic, corpus-derived summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour.We show, with examples, what the corpus can show us about Arabic words and phrases, and how this can support lexicography and inform linguistic research.The paper also presents the 'sketch grammar' (the basis for the word sketches) in some detail; describes the process of building and processing Peer review under responsibility of King Saud University.