The Arabic Natural Language Processing: Introduction and Challenges

Arabic is a Semitic language spoken by more than 330 million people as a native language, in an area extending from the Arabian/Persian Gulf in the East to the Atlantic Ocean in the West. Moreover, it is the language in which 1.4 billion Muslims around the world perform their daily prayers. Over the last few years, Arabic natural language processing (ANLP) has gained increasing importance, and several state of the art systems have been developed for a wide range of applications.