PRODUCTS

Basis Technology’s Arabic Editor provides the language professional a powerful environment for composing, editing, and analyzing complex Arabic documents. It brings together a rich suite of analytical tools in a single framework, including automatic diacritization, automatic transliteration, online dictionaries, and syntactic analysis. It also provides the technology professional with a flexible tool for developing software applications which process Arabic text.

A unique feature of Arabic Editor is its system for entering and editing fully diacritized Arabic text from a standard PC keyboard, also known as the “QWERTY” layout. The input system is based on a transcription scheme used to approximate Arabic sounds in English. It is easily learned in less than one hour, yet provides productivity and accuracy gains of 2x to 4x that of a conventional Arabic keyboard layout.

For example, to type the Arabic name , the user enters “ibraahiim”. The input box appears as the user types.

Reversible Transliteration

Arabic Editor’s input system is based upon Basis Technology’s proprietary, fully-reversible transliteration system for Modern Written Arabic (MWA). This system provides a guaranteed “round trip” for any Arabic text (in Unicode) into and out of the Latin alphabet (in ISO 8859 1 or ASCII). It is an intuitive and meaningful representation for Arabic speakers while also being easy to learn for non-speakers.

The following full sentence is presented both in Latin script form and Arabic script form:

khaTaba al-shaykh ams qaa’ila-n inna al-qaahirä madiinä ‘aZiimä.

Automatic Orthography

Arabic Editor handles all the difficult tasks associated with Hamza (ء) “seating”, by automatically choosing the correct “chair”. To enter a Hamza, the user need only enter an apostrophe (’) and the correct orthography is automatically presented:

Entry	Result	Entry	Result	Entry	Result
jaa’a		qur’aan		ra’iisu-n
juz’a-n		ijraa’aat		ar-ru’uusu
qara’a		sha’nu		ra’’asa

Unlike conventional Arabic keyboards, no special keystroke is required to type the Lam-Alif ligature. This is handled automatically:

Laa

al-islaam

Multiple Text Encoding Systems

Arabic Editor supports all of the major text encoding systems used in the Microsoft Windows environment, including Code Page 1256, ISO 8859 6, Unicode UTF 8, and Unicode UTF 16. A built-in Unicode text inspector is also provided.

Fuzzy Search

Arabic Editor’s “Fuzzy Search” capability searches Arabic text using approximate Latin strings as input criteria. For example, search input such as “Gaddafi”, “Qadhafiy”, “Khadaafy”, or any of several hundred similar variants of the Libyan ruler’s surname will find the one correct Arabic spelling – القذافي – within a text.

Automatic Transliteration

Arabic Editor contains built in support for six widely-used transliteration systems:

Scheme	Developer	Attributes
Basis	Basis Technology	reversible, phonetic
BGN	U.S. Board on Geographic Names	partially reversible, phonetic
Buckwalter	Tim Buckwalter / QAMUS	reversible, non-phonetic
FBIS	Foreign Broadcast Information Service	non-reversible, phonetic
IC	U.S. Intelligence Community	non-reversible, phonetic
SATTS	Standard Arabic Technical Transliteration System	reversible (consonants only), non-phonetic

Invoking the transliterator on the following text:

yields the following display:

Grammatical Analysis

Arabic Editor’s grammatical analyzer allows the user to parse Modern Written Arabic on a word by word basis. For example, grammatical analysis of the word كتب produces the following display: