Khaled Shaalan

Arabic is rooted in the Classical or Qur'anical Arabic, but over the centuries, the language has developed to what is now accepted as Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Arab colloquial dialects are generally only spoken languages, but recently the rate of colloquial written text increases dramatically as a medium of expressing ideas especially across the WWW, usually in the form of blogs and partially colloquial articles. Most of these written colloquial has been in the Egyptian colloquial dialect, which is considered the most widely dialect understood and used throughout the Arab world. We are able to reuse MSA processing tools with colloquial Arabic by transferring colloquial Arabic words into their corresponding MSA words. The advantages of this lexical transfer are to facilitate the communication with colloquial Arabic speakers and restoring it to the standard language in use nowadays. This paper addresses the transfer techniques between colloquial Arabic and MSA, which have not yet been closely studied before. In particular, we present a rule-based lexical transfer approach for converting Egyptian colloquial words into their corresponding MSA words. This process involves morphological analysis and lexical acquisition of colloquial words.