Due to the widespread use of the internet, there are large amounts of information and documents available in several languages. The Arabic language is one of the available important languages in terms of its usage and structure. Search engines like Google and Yahoo support searching in Arabic, yet fail to get good results when slang terms are used in the query. There are difficulties associated with the Arabic language. The main goal of this research is to refine Arabic text-based searching by using Arabic slang terms in queries. This research proposed a framework to enable users to use their slang language in order to retrieve the relevant documents that have been posted in both forms – slang and classical. The framework is designed and implemented based on a context-free grammar that is used to map the user’s slang queries to the equivalent classical ones. On a classical dataset, results showed a 3% improvement on the average values of precision, recall, and F-measure achieved using classical-based queries rather than slang-based ones. Using slang-based queries gives 13% improvement on the average values of the used measures on a slang dataset and 7% improvement on the average values of the used measures on a hybrid dataset.
In the Arabic world, people speak two languages fluently: classical Arabic and slang Arabic. Being able to use slang Arabic terms in Web search queries will be considered a huge leap in modern research on Arabic information retrieval. It would be more comfortable to Arab Web users to obtain the required information available on the Web using slang Arabic queries. This research paper completes the work that was started a year ago in which the ultimate goal of this ongoing project is to design and build a system that is fully capable of replacing Arabic slang-based queries with their equivalent classical terms. The work that has been done in this paper aims to simplify the task for Arab Web users via enabling them to use their slang Arabic to make Web queries. This work provides promising results and shows that people who do not know how to write classical queries can use their slang language directly.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.