Events Automatic Extraction from Arabic Texts

2. Arabic Language

In Arabic processing domain, the research started in the 1970, even before editing texts problems are fully solved. Early studies focused mainly on lexicons. For ten years, the Web internationalization and the proliferation of media in Arabic demonstrated the usefulness of a large number of potential applications of the Arabic NLP. Therefore, researches have begun to address issues more varied as syntax, automatic translation, automatic indexing of documents, information retrieval, etc. (Farber; 2008).

In what follows, we present orthographic and morphological systems of the Arabic language and some problems of its automatic processing as the lack of free resources, lack of vowels and the agglutination of words. Those are the main issues that characterize Arabic and strongly contribute to the delay of its automatic processing. For morphological analysis, the absence of vowels adds additional ambiguity of Arabic words. As for the agglutination, it makes it more difficult to identify the segments that make up these words.