Arabic morphology using only finite-state operations

Finite-state morphology has been successful in the description and computational implementation of a wide variety of natural languages. However, the particular challenges of Arabic, and the limitations of some implementations of finite-state morphology, have led many researchers to believe that finite-state power was not sufficient to handle Arabic and other Semitic morphology. This paper illustrates how the morphotactics and the variation rules of Arabic have been described using only finite-state operations and how this approach has been implemented in a significant morphological analyzer/generator.