Simple Rules for Syllabification of Arabic Texts

The Arabic language is the sixth most used language in the world today. It is also used by United Nation. Moreover, the Arabic alphabet is the second most widely used alphabet around the world. Therefore, the computer processing of Arabic language or Arabic alphabet is more and more important task. In the past, several books about analyzing of the Arabic language were published. But the language analysis is only one step in the language processing. Several approaches to the text compression were developed in the field of text compression. The first and most intuitive is character based compression which is suitable for small files. Another approach called word-based compression become very suitable for very long files. The third approach is called syllable-based, it use syllable as basic element. Algorithms for the syllabification of the English, German or other European language are well known, but syllabification algorithms for Arabic and their usage in text compression has not been deeply investigated. This paper describes a new and very simple algorithm for syllabification of Arabic and its usage in text compression.