Hebrew Computational Linguistics: Past and Future

摘要

This paper reviews the current state of the art in Natural LanguageProcessing for Hebrew, both theoretical and practical. The Hebrewlanguage, like other Semitic languages, poses special challenges fordevelopers of programs for natural language processing: the writingsystem, rich morphology, unique word formation process of roots andpatterns, lack of linguistic corpora that document language usage, allcontribute to making computational approaches to Hebrew challenging. The paper briefly reviews the field of computational linguistics andthe problems it addresses, describes the special difficulties inherentto Hebrew (as well as to other Semitic languages), surveys a widevariety of past and ongoing works and attempts to characterize futureneeds and possible solutions.