Structure and Features of the Arabic Language

expression and Features of the Arabic LanguageThe Arabic talking to is a semantic dustup with a complicated sound structure, which is significantly distinct from the most favourite phrases, much(prenominal) as incline, Spanish, French, and Chinese. Arabic is an official run-in in over 22 countries. It is communicate as first language in North Africa (Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Sudan), the Arabian Peninsula (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen), Middle East (Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria), and early(a) Arab countries (Mauritania, Comoros, Djibouti, Somalia). Since Arabic is the language of the Quran, the holy book of Islam, it is as well as spoken as a plump for language by several Asian countries such as Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan and Malay52. More than 422 million people ar able to speak Arabic, which makes this language the fifth most spoken language in the world, according to53.This chapter give brief descr iption about the relevant basic elements of the Arabic language. This covers Arabic language structure, and the features of the Arabic writing system. The morphology of Arabic language and the Arabic playscript classes, i. e. nouns, verbs, and particles argon presented in this chapter. The Arabic language challenges atomic number 18 also discussed in the last section of this chapter.2.1.Arabic Language StructureThe Arabic language is classified into third gradations Classical Arabic (CA), Colloquial Arabic Dialects (CAD), and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). CA is fully vowelized and includes classical historic liturgical text and old literature texts. CAD includes predominantly spoken vernaculars, and each Arab country has its dialect. MSA is the official language and includes latelys, media, and official documents16. The direction of writing in the Arabic language is from right to left. The alphabet of the Arabic language consists of 28 as shown in Table 2-1.Table 21 The alphab et of the Arabic languageNo.Alone FormTransliterationInitial FormMedial FormEnd Form1a2b3t4th5j6h7kh8d9th10r11z12s13sh14s15tha16ta17tha18aa19gh20f21q22k23l24m25n26h27w28yThe cooking and shape are different for the same earn, depending on its position within the pronounce 24. For example, the letter () has the following styles (),if this letter places at the beginning of the contrive, such as in that means general (), if this letter bulge outs in the middle of the reciprocation, such as in that means know (), if this letter depends at the end of the news program, such as in that means hear. Finally, the letter () can appear as () if this letter appears at the end of a word but disconnected from the letter before it such as in that means fast see Figure (2-1).Figure 2-1 The Formulation and Shape for the Same LetterThus, a trey-letter word may start with a letter in beginning form, followed by a letter in medial form and, finally, by a letter in an end form such asInste ad of But the reality is even worse since a letter, in the middle of a word, may collapse the final or the initial form as inBecause most letter do not connect with any character that comes after. They have only two forms isolated (which is also used as initial) and final (also used as middle). These garner are ( ) for exampleFor the pur idiosyncrasy of this thesis, we have delineate our own transliteration scheme for Arabic alphabets, which is presented in Table 2.1. Each Arabic letter in this scheme is mapped to only one slope letter. Wherever in this thesis, any Arabic word is annotated as a triple attribute to be more clear for a non-Arabic reader. The first attribute for the Arabic word itself which is written in Arabic scripts between two square brackets, the second attribute for an English transliteration which is written in italics, while the third one for English translation which is written between two quotation marks. Figure 2-2 shows an example.Figure 2-2 An Exa mple of Annotated Arabic WordThree garner from the twenty-eight letter appear in different shapes, which are theyHamza This shape can be on Alef , below Alef , on Waaw , on Alef Maqsura , or isolated .Taa-Marbuta This is a special form of the letter , it always appears at the end of the word.Alef-Maqsura This is a special form of the letter , it always appears at the end of the word.The above triplet letters pose some difficulties when building morphological systems. Many of the written Arabic texts and Arabic web sites ignore the Hamza and the two dots above the Taa-Marbuta. For example, the Arabic word (mdrst, school) may appear in many texts as (mdrsh) (which means school or his teacher) without two dots above the last letter. When comparing the last letter in the two preceding(prenominal) spoken communication, we found it was in the first word, while it was in the second word.Twenty-five of Arabic alphabets represent harmoniseds. The remaining three letters represent the weak letters or the long vowels of Arabic (shortly vowels). These letters are Alef, Waaw and Yaa.Moreover, diacritics are used in the Arabic language, which are symbols placed above or below the letters to add distinct pronunciation, grammatical formulation, and sometimes another significance to the whole word. Arabic diacritics include, dama (), fathah (), kasra (), sukon (), double dama (), double fathah (), double kasra () 54. For instance, Table 2-2 presents different pronunciations of the letter (Sad) ((Table 22 Presents different pronunciations of the letter (Sad) ()/s//sun//sin//san//si//sa//su/In appurtenance, Arabic has special mark kind of than the previous diacritics. this mark is called gemination mark (shaddah () or tashdeed). Gemination is a mark written above the letter () to indicate a doubled consonant while pronouncing it. This is done when the first consonant has the null diacritical mark skoon (), and the second consonant has any other diacritical mark. F or example, in the Arabic word () (kssr, he smashed to pieces), when the first syllable ends with ()(s) and the next starts with () (s), the two consonants are united and the gemination mark indicates this union. So, the previous word is written as (), and it has four letters 55.The Arabic language has two genders, feminine () and masculine () three numbers, comical (), dual (), and plural () and three grammatical cases, nominative (), accusative (), and genitive case (). In general, Arabic words are categorized as particles (), nouns (), or verbs (). Nouns in Arabic including adjectives () and adverbs () and can be derived from other nouns, verbs, or particles. Nouns in the Arabic language cover proper nouns (such as people, places, things, ideas, day and month names, etc.). A noun has the nominative case when it is the subject () accusative when it is the object of a verb () and the genitive when it is the object of a preposition ( ) 56. Verbs in Arabic are divided into perf ect ( ), imperfect ( ) and imperative ( ). Arabic particle category includes pronouns(), adjectives(), adverbs(), conjunctions(), prepositions ( ), interjections ( ) and interrogatives ( ) 57.2.2.Arabic MorphologyThe Arabic language is one of the exceedingly sophisticated natural languages which has a very rich and complicated morphology. Morphology is the part of linguistics that deal with the internal structure and formation processes of words. A morpheme is ofttimes defined as the smallest meaningful and significant unit of language, which cannot be broken down into smaller parts58. So, for example, the word apple consists of a single morpheme (the morpheme apple), while the word apples consist of two morphemes the morpheme apple and the morpheme -s (indication of plural). In Arabic language for example, the word (, he asked them) consists also of two morphemes the verb (, he ask) and the pronoun (, them). According to the previous examples, there are two types of morphemes s eeds and affixes. The root is the main morpheme of the word, supplying the main meaning, while the affixes are added in the beginning, middle or end of the root to create new words that add additional meaning of various kinds. In more general morphemes could be classified as (1) roots morphemes and (2) affixes morphemes, Figure 2.3 illustrated this classification.Figure 2-3 Morpheme potpourriRoot is the original morpheme of the word before any transformation processes that comprises the most important part of the word and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. In other words, it is the primary unit of the family of the same word after removing all inflectional and derivational affixes which can stand on their own aswords (independent words). The root morphemes divided into two categories. The first category is called lexical morphemes, which covers the words in the language carrying the content of the message. Examples from English language book, compute, and write, while exa mples from Arabic language (, read), (, play), and (, write). The second category is called stop words morphemes, which covers the function words in the language. The stop words include adverbs, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, and prepositions. Examples from English language on, that, the, and above. Examples from Arabic language (, in), (, above), and (, under).Affixes morphemes are also units of meaning however, they cannot occur as words on their own they conduct to be attached to something such as root morphemes. There are three types of affixes in Arabic language prefixes, infixes, and suffixes. In some cases, all of these affixes can be found in one word as in the word (and the warriors). This word has ten letters, three of them are root-letters, while the others are affixes. The root of this word is (war). The example in Figure 2.4 can clearly deduce the differences between the three main terms used in computational linguistics roots, stems and affixes.Figure 2-4 The Decomposition of the Word .2.3.Arabic Language ChallengesArabic is a challenging language in comparison with other languages such as English for a number of reasonsIn English, prefixes and suffixes are added to the beginning or end of the root to create new words. In Arabic, in addition to the prefixes and suffixes there are infixes that can be added inside the word to create new words that have the same meaning. For example, in English, the word write is the root of word writer. In Arabic, the word writer () is derived from the root write () by adding the letter Alef () inside the root. In these cases, it is difficult to greet between infix letters and the root letters.he Arabic language has a rich and complex morphology in comparison with English. Its richness is attributed to the circumstance that one root can generate several hundreds of words having different meanings. Table 2-4 presents different morphological forms of root reading ().Table 23 Different morphological forms o f word vignette ().WordTensePluralitiesMeaningGender by championHe studied mannishPastSingleShe studiedFemininePresentSingleHe studiesMasculinePresentSingleShe studiedFemininePastDualThey studiedMasculinePastDualThey studiedFemininePresentDualThey reflectMasculinePresentDualThey studyFemininePresentDualThey studyMasculinePresentDualThey studyFemininePastPluralThey studiedMasculinePastPluralThey studiedFemininePresentPluralThey studyFeminineFutureSingleThey will studyMasculineFutureSingleThey will studyFeminineFutureDualThey will studyMasculineFutureDualThey will studyFeminineFuturePluralThey will studyMasculineFuturePluralThey will studyFeminineSome Arabic words have different meanings based on their appearance in the context. Especially when diacritics are not used, the proper meaning of the Arabic word can be determined based on the context. For instance, the word () could be Science (), Teach () or Flag () depending on the diacritics 46.Unfortunately, Arabic people do not expli citly mention the gemination mark in their writing. They depend on their knowledge of the language to supply the missing letter and write the words without it. In consequence, this is make the morphology process of such words is not an easy task 55.Another challenge of automatic Arabic text processing is that proper nouns in Arabic do not start with a capital letter as in English, and Arabic letters do not have lower and upper case, which makes identifying proper names, acronyms, and abbreviations difficult.In English language, a word is a single entity. It may be a noun, a verb, a preposition, an article, , etc. While in Arabic language a single word could be a complete sentence. For example, Table 2.4 shows some single Arabic words and their equivalent English translations.Table 24 Example An Arabic Word could be a Complete English SentenceArabic WordEnglish SentencesShe goI will read itWe hear himHe told meThen he departedThere are several free benchmarking English datasets used for document categorization, such as 20 Newsgroup, which contains around 20,000 documents distributed almost evenly into 20 classes Reuters 21,578, which contains 21,578 documents belonging to 17 classes and RCV1 (Reuters principal sum Volume 1), which contains 806,791 documents classified into four main classes. Unfortunately, there is no free benchmarking dataset for Arabic document classification.In the Arabic language, the problem of synonyms and broken plural forms are widespread. Examples of synonyms in Arabic are (, , , ) which means (Come), and (, , , ) which means (house).In the Arabic language, the problem of broken plural forms occurs when some irregular nouns in the Arabic language in plural takes another morphological form different from its initial form in singular. For example, the word (Doctors, ) is a broken plural of the masculine singular (Doctor, ).In the Arabic language, one word may have more than lexical category (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) in different con texts such as (wellspring, ), (Eye, ), (was appointed, ).In addition to the different forms of the Arabic word that result from the derivational process, there are some words lack authentic Arabic roots like Arabized words which are translated from other languages, such as (programs, ), (geography, ), (internet, ), etc. or names, places such as (countries, ), (cities, ), (rivers, ), (mountains, ), (deserts, ), etc.2.4.SummaryArabic language is an international language belonging to the Semitic languages family (different from Indo-European languages in some respects). The Arabic alphabet consists of twenty-eight letters in addition to some variants of existing letters. Each letter can appear in up to four different shapes, depending on the position of the letter in the Arabic word. Twenty-five of Arabic letters represent consonants. The remaining three letters represent the long vowels of Arabic. The Arabic writing system goes from right to left and most letters in Arabic wor ds are conjugated together.Arabic has a rich and complex morphology. In many cases, one orthographic word is comprising many semantic and syntactic words. Traditionally there are two types of morphology in Arabic language roots morphemes and affixes morphemes. The root morphemes divided into two categories. The first category is called lexical morphemes, which covers the words in the language carrying the content of the message. The second category is called stop words morphemes, which covers the function words such as adverbs, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, and prepositions. Affixes morphemes cannot occur as words on their own they need to be attached to something such as root morphemes. There are three types of affixes in Arabic language prefixes, infixes, and suffixes.All Arabic words could be classified into three main categories according to the part-of-speech noun, verb, and particle. The noun and verb in Arabic might be further divided according to number (singular, d ual and plural), and case (nominative, genitive and accusative). Arabic. The Arabic language is a challenging language in comparison with other languages and has a complicated morphological structure. Therefore, the Arabic language needs a set of preprocessing routines to be suitable for cl