Arabic Information Retrieval

In the past several years, Arabic Information Retrieval (IR) has garnered significant attention. The main research interests have focused on retrieval of formal language, mostly in the news domain, with ad hoc retrieval, OCR document retrieval, and cross-language retrieval. The literature on other aspects of retrieval continues to be sparse or non-existent, though some of these aspects have been investigated by industry. Others aspects of Arabic retrieval that have received attention include document image retrieval, speech search, social media and web search, and filtering. However, efforts on different aspects of Arabic retrieval continue to be deficient and severely lacking behind efforts in other languages. The survey covers: 1) general properties of the Arabic language; 2) some of the aspects of Arabic that affect retrieval; 3) Arabic processing necessary for effective Arabic retrieval; 4) Arabic retrieval in public IR evaluations; 5) specialized retrieval problems, namely Arabic-English CLIR, Arabic Document Image Retrieval, Arabic Social Search, Arabic Web Search, Question Answering, Image retrieval, and Arabic Speech Search; 6) Arabic IR and NLP resources; and 7) open IR problems that require further attention.