{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,4]],"date-time":"2026-05-04T00:28:23Z","timestamp":1777854503455,"version":"3.51.4"},"reference-count":30,"publisher":"SAGE Publications","issue":"4","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2015,5,18]],"date-time":"2015-05-18T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1431907200000},"content-version":"tdm","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/page\/policies\/text-and-data-mining-license"}],"content-domain":{"domain":["journals.sagepub.com"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Journal of Information Science"],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2015,8]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>The widespread use of colloquial dialects among the younger generation of Arabs is depriving many of them the fruits of information freedom. Although most Arabs have no problem with reading text in formal Arabic, widely known as Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), the younger generation is more adept at colloquial Arabic, mainly owing to the widespread use of social media. The current search engines cater mostly to MSA. This means that materials written in colloquial are off-limits to those who use MSA, and similarly the MSA contents are off-limits for those who communicate in colloquial only. To achieve the full potential of an information-retrieval system, we need a successful scheme that interprets queries whether they are in MSA, colloquial Arabic or a combination of both. In this paper we design an information-retrieval system that addresses our concern against the backdrop of one of the local dialects in Saudi Arabia. Our system is based on modifying an MSA stemming technique and a set of colloquial \u2194 MSA conversion rules that are lexicon based. We tested the system using 44 queries on a corpus of over 1400 documents (MSA, colloquial, mix). The average precision was 84.3%, while the average recall was 96.5%. In the second test we compared the precision of the retrieved documents by our system vs Google and Yahoo! search engines. The respective average precisions were 78.2, 51.9 and 56.2%.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1177\/0165551515585720","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2015,5,18]],"date-time":"2015-05-18T22:01:26Z","timestamp":1431986486000},"page":"506-517","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/sage-journals-update-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":11,"title":["Modern information retrieval in Arabic \u2013 catering to standard and colloquial Arabic users"],"prefix":"10.1177","volume":"41","author":[{"given":"Aqil M.","family":"Azmi","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Eman A.","family":"Aljafari","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"179","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2015,5,18]]},"reference":[{"key":"bibr1-0165551515585720","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1644879.1644881"},{"key":"bibr2-0165551515585720","volume-title":"CIA World Fact Book","year":"2008"},{"key":"bibr3-0165551515585720","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1080\/00437956.1959.11659702"},{"key":"bibr4-0165551515585720","volume-title":"Contemporary Arabic linguistics in honor of El-Said Badawi","author":"Ferguson CA","year":"1996"},{"key":"bibr5-0165551515585720","first-page":"125","volume-title":"Handbook for Arabic language teaching professionals in the 21st century","author":"Wahba KM","year":"2006"},{"key":"bibr6-0165551515585720","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"61","DOI":"10.1163\/9789401200431_006","volume-title":"Language contact in times of globalization","author":"Daoudi A","year":"2011"},{"issue":"16","key":"bibr7-0165551515585720","first-page":"237","volume":"18","author":"Cadora FJ","year":"1976","journal-title":"Anthropological Lingistics"},{"key":"bibr8-0165551515585720","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.3115\/1220175.1220261"},{"key":"bibr9-0165551515585720","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-540-89533-6_57"},{"key":"bibr10-0165551515585720","unstructured":"Weyman G. Translating tweets from the Arabic spring: Towards a translation workbench for twitter, 2012. Available at: meedan.org\/author\/george\/ (accessed 5 August 2014)."},{"key":"bibr11-0165551515585720","first-page":"75","volume":"16","author":"Cote RA","year":"2009","journal-title":"Arizona Working Papers in SLA & Teaching"},{"key":"bibr12-0165551515585720","unstructured":"Curley N. The rise of Arabic on the web, 2012. Available at: wamda.com\/2012\/04\/the-rise-of-arabic-on-the-web-infographic (accessed 15 August 2013)."},{"key":"bibr13-0165551515585720","unstructured":"Semiocast. Arabic highest growth on Twitter, English expression stabilizes below 40%, 2011. Available at: semiocast.com\/publications\/2011_11_24_Arabic_highest_growth_on_Twitter (accessed 28 September 2013)."},{"key":"bibr14-0165551515585720","unstructured":"Kingdom leads growth in Arabic digital content. Saudi Gazette issue 10, September 2013. Available at: saudigazette.com.sa\/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentid=20130910179928 (accessed 9 Jun 2014)."},{"key":"bibr15-0165551515585720","unstructured":"#Saudi Arabic world\u2019s 2nd most Twitter-happy nation. Arab News, issue 20, May 2013. Available at: arabnews.com\/news\/452204 (accessed 9 Jun 2014)."},{"key":"bibr16-0165551515585720","first-page":"269","volume-title":"Proceeding of the 25th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval","author":"Xu J","year":"2002"},{"key":"bibr17-0165551515585720","volume-title":"The 12th annual conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human language technologies (NAACL-HLT 2012)","author":"Habash N","year":"2012"},{"key":"bibr18-0165551515585720","volume-title":"LREC workshop on semitic language processing","author":"Diab M","year":"2010"},{"key":"bibr19-0165551515585720","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.3115\/1621787.1621791"},{"issue":"1","key":"bibr20-0165551515585720","first-page":"39","volume":"8","author":"Al-Gaphari GH","year":"2010","journal-title":"International Journal of Information Science and Management"},{"key":"bibr21-0165551515585720","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1177\/0165551512442480"},{"key":"bibr22-0165551515585720","first-page":"176","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 50th annual meeting of ACL","author":"Mohamed E","year":"2012"},{"key":"bibr23-0165551515585720","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1002\/aris.2007.1440410118"},{"key":"bibr24-0165551515585720","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/ITCC.2005.90"},{"key":"bibr25-0165551515585720","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1177\/0165551514524675"},{"key":"bibr26-0165551515585720","volume-title":"Proceedings of the workshop on Semitic language processing (LREC-2010)","author":"Benajiba Y","year":"2010"},{"key":"bibr27-0165551515585720","first-page":"39","volume-title":"Proceedings of the International Workshop on Improving Non English Web Searching (iNEWS \u201807)","author":"Ahmad F","year":"2007"},{"key":"bibr28-0165551515585720","first-page":"385","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 6th text retrieval conference (TREC-6)","author":"Davis MW","year":"1998"},{"key":"bibr29-0165551515585720","first-page":"4","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 11th national computer conference","author":"Al-Fedagi SS","year":"1989"},{"key":"bibr30-0165551515585720","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1002\/asi.21063"}],"container-title":["Journal of Information Science"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/doi\/pdf\/10.1177\/0165551515585720","content-type":"application\/pdf","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/doi\/full-xml\/10.1177\/0165551515585720","content-type":"application\/xml","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/doi\/pdf\/10.1177\/0165551515585720","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,29]],"date-time":"2026-04-29T23:09:06Z","timestamp":1777504146000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/doi\/10.1177\/0165551515585720"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2015,5,18]]},"references-count":30,"journal-issue":{"issue":"4","published-print":{"date-parts":[[2015,8]]}},"alternative-id":["10.1177\/0165551515585720"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/0165551515585720","relation":{},"ISSN":["0165-5515","1741-6485"],"issn-type":[{"value":"0165-5515","type":"print"},{"value":"1741-6485","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2015,5,18]]}}}