Towards Arabic Electronic Dictionary

Textual processing involves morphological, syntactic and semantic analysis. Many unilingual dictionaries exist for many languages. However, Arabic has no such an electronic one. Besides, to look for a word in an Arabic-Arabic dictionary is rather a tedious job; one has to know the root of the word if it does exist, know the origin of "Alef and the origin of "Hamza",... A pioneer work has been done in HIAST, where the data from "Al Wasseet Dictionary" has been computerized in a form of a Database. Other fields have been added by Arabic linguists [1] to enrich the dictionary and help in morphological, syntactic and semantic analysis. Data from other dictionaries has also been added. In a second step, a Graphical User Interface is built, enabling the search of a word without the need of human prior processing. The work can make the core for an Arabic Electronic Dictionary, with the help of other linguists from other Arab countries to complete the dictionary and update it regularly.