This book is the first volume that focuses on the specific challenges of machine translation with Arabic either as source or target language. It nicely fills a gap in the literature by covering approaches that belong to the three major paradigms of machine translation: Example-based, statistical and knowledge-based. It provides broad but rigorous coverage of the methods for incorporating linguistic knowledge into empirical MT. The book brings together original and extended contributions from a group of distinguished researchers from both academia and industry. It is a welcome and much-needed repository of important aspects in Arabic Machine Translation such as morphological analysis and syntactic reordering, both central to reducing the distance between Arabic and other languages. Most of the proposed techniques are also applicable to machine translation of Semitic languages other than Arabic, as well as translation of other languages with a complex morphology.

Machine Translation (MT) has become widely used throughout the world as a medium of communication between those who live in different countries and speak different languages. However, translation between distant languages constitutes a challenge for machines. Therefore, translation evaluation is poised to play a significant role in the process of designing and developing effective MT systems. This book evaluates three prominent MT systems, including Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, and Sakhr, each of which provides translation between English and Arabic. In the book Almahasees scrutinizes the capacity of the three systems in dealing with translation between English and Arabic in a large corpus taken from various domains, including the United Nation (UN), the World Health Organization (WHO), the Arab League, Petra News Agency reports, and two literary texts: The Old Man and the Sea and The Prophet. The evaluation covers holistic analysis to assess the output of the three systems in terms of Translation Automation User Society (TAUS) adequacy and fluency scales. The text also looks at error analysis to evaluate the systems’ output in terms of orthography, lexis, grammar, and semantics at the entire-text level and in terms of lexis, grammar, and semantics at the collocation level. The research findings contained within this volume provide important feedback about the capabilities of the three MT systems with respect to EnglishArabic translation and paves the way for further research on such an important topic. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of translation studies and translation technology.

This book encompasses a collection of topics covering recent advances that are important to the Arabic language in areas of natural language processing, speech and image analysis. This book presents state-of-the-art reviews and fundamentals as well as applications and recent innovations.The book chapters by top researchers present basic concepts and challenges for the Arabic language in linguistic processing, handwritten recognition, document analysis, text classification and speech processing. In addition, it reports on selected applications in sentiment analysis, annotation, text summarization, speech and font analysis, word recognition and spotting and question answering.Moreover, it highlights and introduces some novel applications in vital areas for the Arabic language. The book is therefore a useful resource for young researchers who are interested in the Arabic language and are still developing their fundamentals and skills in this area. It is also interesting for scientists who wish to keep track of the most recent research directions and advances in this area.

This book brings together scientists, researchers, practitioners, and students from academia and industry to present recent and ongoing research activities concerning the latest advances, techniques, and applications of natural language processing systems, and to promote the exchange of new ideas and lessons learned. Taken together, the chapters of this book provide a collection of high-quality research works that address broad challenges in both theoretical and applied aspects of intelligent natural language processing. The book presents the state-of-the-art in research on natural language processing, computational linguistics, applied Arabic linguistics and related areas. New trends in natural language processing systems are rapidly emerging – and finding application in various domains including education, travel and tourism, and healthcare, among others. Many issues encountered during the development of these applications can be resolved by incorporating language technology solutions. The topics covered by the book include: Character and Speech Recognition; Morphological, Syntactic, and Semantic Processing; Information Extraction; Information Retrieval and Question Answering; Text Classification and Text Mining; Text Summarization; Sentiment Analysis; Machine Translation Building and Evaluating Linguistic Resources; and Intelligent Language Tutoring Systems.

This book provides system developers and researchers in natural language processing and computational linguistics with the necessary background information for working with the Arabic language. The goal is to introduce Arabic linguistic phenomena and review the state-of-the-art in Arabic processing. The book discusses Arabic script, phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax and semantics, with a final chapter on machine translation issues. The chapter sizes correspond more or less to what is linguistically distinctive about Arabic, with morphology getting the lion's share, followed by Arabic script. No previous knowledge of Arabic is needed. This book is designed for computer scientists and linguists alike. The focus of the book is on Modern Standard Arabic; however, notes on practical issues related to Arabic dialects and languages written in the Arabic script are presented in different chapters. Table of Contents: What is "Arabic"? / Arabic Script / Arabic Phonology and Orthography / Arabic Morphology / Computational Morphology Tasks / Arabic Syntax / A Note on Arabic Semantics / A Note on Arabic and Machine Translation

In light of the rapid rise of new trends and applications in various natural language processing tasks, this book presents high-quality research in the field. Each chapter addresses a common challenge in a theoretical or applied aspect of intelligent natural language processing related to Arabic language. Many challenges encountered during the development of the solutions can be resolved by incorporating language technology and artificial intelligence. The topics covered include machine translation; speech recognition; morphological, syntactic, and semantic processing; information retrieval; text classification; text summarization; sentiment analysis; ontology construction; Arabizi translation; Arabic dialects; Arabic lemmatization; and building and evaluating linguistic resources. This book is a valuable reference for scientists, researchers, and students from academia and industry interested in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, especially for Arabic linguistics and related areas.

Legal language differs from ordinary language, not just in vocabulary, but also in its morphology, syntax, semantics and other linguistic features. This book explores the differences in such features, in addition to investigating the description, development, distinctive features, characteristics, difficulties and problems of drafting legal English and Arabic texts within their respective legal contexts. Particular attention is given throughout to the characteristic features of legal language that usually tend to be ignored in academic analysis. As such, the book will be of interest to both lawyers and linguists, and will help foster a greater understanding of the features of legal language and how inaccuracies can be avoided.

This is the first comprehensive overview of computational approaches to Arabic morphology. The subtitle aims to reflect that widely different computational approaches to the Arabic morphological system have been proposed. The book provides a showcase of the most advanced language technologies applied to one of the most vexing problems in linguistics. It covers knowledge-based and empirical-based approaches.

This book focuses on the problematic issues arising when translating and interpreting classical Arabic texts, which represent a challenging business for many scholars, especially with regards to religious texts. Additionally, the reception of these interpretations and translations not only informs the perception of Muslims and their awareness of the outside world, but also impacts the vision and perception of non-Muslims of Islam and the Muslim world. Consequently, this book reconsiders the concepts of understanding and interpretation, and their nexus in the mechanism of translation, and proposes a novel, hermeneutic method of translating, interpreting, and understanding traditional and classical Arab texts. Handling the issues of understanding from a hermeneutical perspective is shown here to remove the possibility of translation and interpretation rendering a distorted translated text. Drawing on the powerful interpretive theories of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger, the hermeneutic method of translation starts from a premise that the meaning of a classical text cannot be deduced solely by linguistic analysis of its words, but requires in-depth investigation of the invisible, contextual elements that control and shape its meaning. Traditional texts are seen in this model as ‘travelling texts’ whose meaning is transformed across time and space. The hermeneutic method of translation allows the translator to identify those elements from the real-world that informed a classical text at the time of its writing, so that it can be adapted and made relevant to its contemporary context. Traditional texts can enlighten our minds and cultivate our souls; religious texts can elevate our behavior and thinking, and help refine our confused contemporary lives. When texts become isolated from their world, they lose this lofty goal of enlightenment and elevation.

This book explores the influence of translation on the Arabic language, with particular emphasis on the translation of English idioms by journalists working at Arabic satellite TV stations, using a mixed-method approach (quantitative and qualitative). It begins from a belief that the impact of broadcast media on Arabic speakers is more instant, wider and farther-reaching than that caused or triggered by any other branch of mass media, as not all features of television appear in other media. The book focuses on idioms because of the difficulties associated with translating them, and also because the literature review revealed inadequacy in understanding this intriguing part of the development of the Arabic language. In contrast to other similar titles, the book examines the possible factors causing journalists to resort to idiom literalisation, including those relating to demographic characteristics. The main significance of this book is that it has practical implications for its potential audience, both practitioners and professional peers. It provides information to enable media translators and lexicographers to become more sensitive towards the logico-semantic relationships present in idiomatic expressions, and to improve their application of idiomatic expressions in their translations. Overall, the results presented here will serve to guide media translators and lexicographers’ choice in the usage of idioms to produce better quality translations and dictionaries. This insight is important not only to translators and lexicographers, but also to language teachers and students of translation. Pedagogically, the findings of the current book will encourage translation teachers to reconsider their strategies for teaching English idioms. Students of translation and English language learners in general will also benefit from the results of this book.