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.

Contents: Arabic Speech Recognition: Challenges and State of the Art (Sherif Mahdy Abdou and Abdullah M Moussa)Introduction to Arabic Computational Linguistics (Mohsen Rashwan)Challenges in Arabic Natural Language Processing (Khaled Shaalan, Sanjeera Siddiqui, Manar Alkhatib and Azza Abdel Monem)Arabic Recognition Based on Statistical Methods (A Belaïd and A Kacem Echi)Arabic Word Spotting Approaches and Techniques (Muna Khayyat, Louisa Lam and Ching Y Suen)A'rib — A Tool to Facilitate School Children's Ability to Analyze Arabic Sentences Syntactically (Mashael Almedlej and Aqil M Azmi)Semi-Automatic Data Annotation, POS Tagging and Mildly Context-Sensitive Disambiguation: The eXtended Revised AraMorph (XRAM) (Giuliano Lancioni, Laura Garofalo, Raoul Villano, Francesca Romana Romani, Marta Campanelli, Ilaria Cicola, Ivana Pepe, Valeria Pettinari and Simona Olivieri)WeightedNileULex: A Scored Arabic Sentiment Lexicon for Improved Sentiment Analysis (Samhaa R El-Beltagy)Islamic Fatwa Request Routing via Hierarchical Multi-Label Arabic Text Categorization (Reda Zayed, Mohamed Farouk and Hesham Hefny)Arabic and English Typeface Personas (Shima Nikfal and Ching Y Suen)End-to-End Lexicon Free Arabic Speech Recognition Using Recurrent Neural Networks (Abdelrahman Ahmedy, Yasser Hifny, Khaled Shaalan and Sergio Toral)Bio-Inspired Optimization Algorithms for Improving Artificial Neural Networks: A Case Study on Handwritten Letter Recognition (Ahmed A Ewees and Ahmed T Sahlol)
Readership: Students and researchers in Arabic document and speech/image/text processing.

Ching Y. Suen