Computational Linguistics and Language Physiology: Insights from Arabic NLP and Cooperative Editing

Computer processing of written Arabic raises a number of challenges to traditional parsing architectures on many levels of linguistic analysis. In this contribution, we review some of these core issues and the demands they make, to suggest different strategies to successfully tackle them. In the end, we assess these issues in connection with the behaviour of neuro-biologically inspired lexical architectures known as Temporal Self-Organising Maps. We show that, far from being language-specific problems, issues in Arabic processing can shed light on some fundamental characteristics of the human language processor, such as structure-based lexical recoding, concurrent, competitive activation of output candidates and dynamic selection of optimal solutions.