The World Wide Web (WWW) today is so vast that it has become more and more difficult to find answers to questions using standard search engines. Current search engines can return ranked lists of documents, but they do not deliver direct answers to the user. The goal of Open Domain Question Answering (QA) systems is to take a natural language question, understand the meaning of the question, and present a short answer as a response based on a repository of information. In this paper we present QARAB, a QA system that combines techniques from Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing. This combination enables domain independence. The system takes natural language questions expressed in the Arabic language and attempts to provide short answers in Arabic. To do so, it attempts to discover what the user wants by analyzing the question and a variety of candidate answers from a linguistic point of view.

Many papers have discussed different aspects of Arabic verb morphology. Some of them used patterns; others used patterns and affixes. But very few have discussed Arabic noun morphology particularly for nouns that are not derived from verbs. In this paper we describe a learning system that can analyze Arabic nouns to produce their morphological information and their paradigms with respect to both gender and number using a rule base that uses suffix analysis as well as pattern analysis. The system utilizes user-feedback to classify the noun and identify the group that it belongs to.

In this paper we describe a system for building an Arabic lexicon automatically by tagging Arabic newspaper text. In this system we are using several techniques for tagging the words in the text and figuring out their types and their features. The major techniques that we are using are: finding phrases, analyzing the affixes of the words, and analyzing their pattems. Proper nouns are particularly difficult to identify in the Arabic language; we describe techniques for isolating them.

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The Web considers one of the main sources of customer opinions and reviews which they are represented in two formats; structured data (numeric ratings) and unstructured data (textual comments). Millions of textual comments about goods and services are posted on the web by customers and every day thousands are added, make it a big challenge to read and understand them to make them a useful structured data for customers and decision makers. Sentiment analysis or Opinion mining is a popular technique for summarizing and analyzing those opinions and reviews. In this paper, we use natural language processing techniques to generate some rules to help us understand customer opinions and reviews (textual comments) written in the Arabic language for the purpose of understanding each one of them and then convert them to a structured data. We use adjectives as a key point to highlight important information in the text then we work around them to tag attributes that describe the subject of the reviews, and we associate them with their values (adjectives).