This paper discusses several issues in Arabic orthography that were encountered in the process of performing morphology analysis and POS tagging of 542,543 Arabic words in three newswire corpora at the LDC during [2002][2003][2004], by means of the Buckwalter Arabic Morphological Analyzer. The most important issues involved variation in the orthography of Modern Standard Arabic that called for specific changes to the Analyzer algorithm, and also a more rigorous definition of typographic errors. Some orthographic anomalies had a direct impact on word tokenization, which in turn affected the morphology analysis and assignment of POS tags.

Despite years of research on vocabulary learning and teaching, relatively little is known about strategies for effective mastery of vocabulary in less commonly taught languages. The current study focuses on English native speakers studying Modern Standard Arabic to identify effective ways to present and learn new vocabulary using tasks varying in the degree of lexical context provided and the amount of cognitive effort needed to complete them.

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The “Did You Mean...?” system, described in this article, is a spelling corrector for Arabic that is designed specifically for L2 learners of dialectal Arabic in the context of dictionary lookup. The authors use an orthographic density metric to motivate the need for a finer-grained ranking method for candidate words than unweighted Levenshtein edit distance. The Did You Mean...? architecture is described, and the authors show that mean reciprocal rank can be improved by tuning operation weights according to sound confusions, and by anticipating likely spelling variants.