The Arabic language in light of artificial intelligence

In a new reef that we have never seen before, the trends of artificial intelligence technologies are resounding today, will the children of previous generations be able to catch up?

It seems a fallacy question, but it is strongly raised in a time of technology dominance and unprecedented explosion, and there are fears that artificial intelligence will invade various areas of life.

In fact, it is not so much about age and aging as it is about the desire of man to keep up with everything new and take note of it.

Artificial intelligence is no longer only the new age, but has become a real obsession for many political and institutional systems; it has invaded many areas of life, dominating many of its details very quickly.

Artificial intelligence today is not like the stage of inventing computers and the entry of the Internet to all aspects of life, its extensions are wider, its effects are deeper and its movement is faster, it looks like a real invasion welcomed by human beings, and here one wonders if it is true of the description of the truly noble invasion, or that the next is too big to be surrounded by it?

What is artificial intelligence, and what is its relationship to languages in general and Arabic in particular? What are its effects on teaching Arabic to young children and non-native speakers?

Various questions have become haunting those working in the field of languages for love, care, service and education.

The concept of artificial intelligence must be liberalized first as a new term that has entered the field of language education, and then we will monitor its negative and positive effects on education processes.

Artificial intelligence is defined as the machine simulation of human work, and its ability to keep pace with it in accomplishing tasks that need human intelligence to accomplish, and even surpass it in speed of performance and accuracy of investigation and achievement, and we cannot deny that the questions raised by artificial intelligence are still much greater than the answers, so to what extent do predictions believe the capabilities of artificial intelligence that are sweeping the world around us?

Will artificial intelligence programs and applications be able to displace the teacher with all his human experiences and interactions with his surroundings, colleagues and students? Will the student achieve his goal from the educational process and the acquisition of Arabic and its skills when artificial intelligence replaces professors?

What is the danger of dispensing with human beings in education, and is this possibility really possible? What are the repercussions of this on professors on the one hand, on students on the other, and on the entire education process on the third hand? I think, sorry, that today we cannot arrive at precise, inevitable and definitive answers to all these questions.

Dr. Nabil Ali, a pioneer in the field of language processing and computer engineering, who died in 2016 - may God have mercy on him - was known for his care in the field of language computing, and he had a famous saying that no one can adapt modern technology to deal accurately and respectfully with the Arabic language and its speakers except its children themselves.

He has worked diligently to serve the Arabic language through technology, not to mention his research, which shed light on the relationship of the Arabic language with computing, and the difficulties it faces related to the nature of the etymological language and its morphological rules, and not only proposed solutions, but also created mechanisms and established several programs, such as the automatic syntax program, automatic exchange, automatic formation, and others, and these programs have proven effective and able to keep pace with them.

Does AI pose a threat to educational functions in the field of Arabic language service?

In fact, we can no longer ignore the effective role of artificial intelligence in education, but we need to rationalize its use and how to deal with it. The question is: Does man today have the ability to rationalize and direct artificial intelligence or has he already surpassed us? What is the extent of its impact on educational functions in the field of Arabic language service?

Artificial intelligence is concerned with computing language, that is, creating programs that understand language and release it with technical outputs that commercialize the human ability to deal with language.

Anyone who has tried to use Word to write knows the electronic proofreader who points out errors and alerts the writer to correct them. Yes, this is one of the manifestations of artificial intelligence in its simplest form in terms of correcting writing in Arabic, in addition to the digital lexicon, simultaneous translation of the language and its audio output.

Today, anyone who stumbles in reading the Arabic language, who wants to learn it without a human intermediary, and who wants to listen to literature written in Arabic away from audio programs that rely on human readings and recordings, is able to choose the literary piece he wants, whether poetic or prose, and listen to it through artificial intelligence applications.

Add to this text analysis programs capable of counting the frequency of words in general, counting their frequency in the texts themselves, plagiarism and theft detection programs, regardless of their accuracy and the need for development to be able to exclude legitimate repetitions that do not fall within the context of plagiarism in the first place; programs for extracting texts from images or adding them to them, not to mention various syntax programs, free automated proofreader software as well as translation programs.

But despite their abundance, these programs have not yet proven their ability to exceed human capacity, as they are developing at an amazing speed, and I think that the future may bring us surprises that reduce the percentage of the possibility of expected errors when using these mechanisms, especially with the dependence of artificial intelligence on the sound mechanism in many of its applications, and perhaps I am not exaggerating if I say: The day when these programs and others can deal with the Arabic language with the least possible errors or stumbles is no longer far away.

What makes dealing with Arabic in the field of artificial intelligence more difficult than others?

The nature of the Arabic language, including the spelling thumb - as some scholars like to call it - and the difference between linguistic schools in spelling rules, such as the differences between the Egyptian school and the Levantine school - so to speak - and the richness of the morphological language and its etymological nature, and the difference in Arabic dialects and their use in the Arab street, all of this makes it difficult, or let's say difficult to comprehend automatically, and the Arabic Language Center in Abu Dhabi presented during the Arabic Language Summit held in January 2022 the names of programs that tried to skip The pitfalls of the Arabic language compared to others, namely: "Chat GPT", "Full Tools" and the Camillera system, which can analyze the language directly and automatically.

What if we ask AI itself this question?

When artificial intelligence was asked this question, he replied that dealing with the Arabic language in the field of artificial intelligence is more difficult than dealing with other languages, and represents special challenges due to the linguistic complexity in the contexts of grammar, morphology and semantics, so it is difficult to build its own models based on artificial intelligence.

The presence of roots, weights and verbs increases the complexity of linguistic processing and analysis of Arabic sentences, not to mention the multilingualism in dialects and differences between Arab countries, and even between cities in the same country, which makes the development of linguistic models more difficult and complex.

Also, due to limited data, despite the widespread spread of the Arabic language in the world, the data available for training and learning in the field of artificial intelligence is limited compared to other languages such as English, and handwritten Arabic texts are additional challenges, and need advanced technologies to address them accurately and correctly.

What is most surprising and perhaps impressive about AI's answer is that it pays attention to the cultural and social bias of language, biases that require a deep understanding of context and culture.

However, he stresses that despite these challenges, there is a continuous development in the field of artificial intelligence and its applications on the Arabic language, and there is continuous work and a relentless pursuit to improve models and tools to achieve more accurate and effective applications in this field.

As for the reason for his weakness in other areas of research that rely on the Arabic language to access information, he replied that the main reason is the lack of resources in Arabic, as if he was asked about an event in Arabic, his sources are less than if the question itself was in English, for example.

Arabic cannot be an education and learning in isolation from the tyrannical artificial intelligence revolution, and what many see of threats and fears can be transformed into opportunities to facilitate the teaching of Arabic, and facilitate the correction of reading and texts for Arabs eager to improve their tongues and the tongues of their children in Arabic, and for non-native speakers who are eager to learn it to be able to deal with the Book of God Almighty recitation and management, or to deal with Arabic poetic and prose texts in taste and study.

We were able to open the doors to arrivals and windows to the wind, provided that our feet are firm and our roots are deep, then everything that comes to us will enrich reality, and the wind, with His permission, will be "human beings in the hands of His mercy."