Arabic is a Semitic language that is rich in its morphology. Arabic has very numerous and complex morphological rules. Arabic morphological analysis has gained the focus of Arabic natural language processing research for a long time in order to achieve the automated understanding of Arabic. With the recent technological advances, Arabic natural language generation has received attentions in order to allow for a room for wider applications such as machine translation. For machine translation systems that support a large number of languages, interlingua-based machine translation approaches are particularly attractive. In this paper, we report our attempt at developing a rule-based Arabic morphological generator for task-oriented interlingua-based spoken dialogues. Examples of morphological generation results from the Arabic morphological generator will be given and will illustrate how the system works. Nevertheless, we will discuss the issues related to the morphological generation of Arabic words from an interlingua representation, and present how we have handled them.

Name identification has been worked on quite intensively for the past few years, and has been incorporated into several products. Many researchers have attacked this problem in a variety of languages but only a few limited researches have focused on Named Entity Recognition (NER) for Arabic text due to the lack of resources for Arabic named entities and the limited amount of progress made in Arabic natural language processing in general. In this paper, we present the results of our attempt at the recognition and extraction of 10 most important named entities in Arabic script; the person name, location, company, date, time, price, measurement, phone number, ISBN and file name. We developed the system, Name Entity Recognition for Arabic (NERA), using a rule-based approach. The system consists of a whitelist representing a dictionary of names, and a grammar, in the form of regular expressions, which are responsible for recognizing the named entities. NERA is evaluated using our own corpora that are tagged in a semi-automated way, and the performance results achieved were satisfactory in terms of precision, recall, and f-measure.

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