Sentential Count Rules for Arabic Language

Abstract

This paper presents two grammars for reading numbers of classical andmodern Arabic language. The grammars make use of the structured Arabiccounting system to present an accurate and compact grammar that can beeasily implemented in different platforms. Automating the process ofreading numbers from its numerical representation to its sentential formhas many applications. Inquiring about your bank balance over the phone,automatically writing the amount of checks (from numerical form toletter form), and reading for the blind people are some of the fieldsthat automated reading of numbers can be of service. The parsing problemof sentential representation of numbers in the Arabic language is alsoaddressed. A grammar to convert from sentential representation to thenumerical representation is also presented. Grammars presented can beused to translate from the sentential Arabic numbers to sententialEnglish numbers, and vice versa, by using the common numericalrepresentation as an intermediate code. Such methodology can be used toaid the automatic translation between the two natural languages. Allgrammars described in this paper have been implemented on a UNIX system.Examples of different number representations and the output of theimplementation of the grammars are given as part of the paper.