1. Introduction

A general, but operational and even corpus-based, definition of ‘linguistics’ is: “the study of the way in which language works” (Collins 1997:972–II). Here, the scope of ‘language’ will be narrowed down to ‘Arabic’. Arabic ‘linguistics’, then, is “the study of the way in which Arabic works”. Adding the pre-modifier ‘computational’, Arabic computational linguistics presupposes two alternatives: (a) the study of the way in which Arabic works, while us…