The Need for a Novel Approach to Design Derivation Lexicon for Semitic Languages Enchalew Y. Ayalew 1 , Laure Vieu 2 and Million M. Beyene 3 1 Software Engineering Department, Addis Ababa Science & Technology University, Ethiopia enchalew.yifru@aastu.edu.et 2 National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, France Laure.vieu@irit.fr 3 School of Information Science, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia million.meshesha@aau.edu.et Abstract. Morphology knowledge is relevant in language learning, information retrieval and natural language processing. Derivation lexicons are organized and comprehensive collections of the morphological variants of a language‘s vocabulary. These lexicons can be developed either through analysis-based syn- thesis of large text corpora or through synthesis of surface forms from roots, stems, lemmas and morphological rules. Much of the research attempted in de- veloping derivation lexicon for Indo-European languages, which are concatena- tive, focus on analysis-based synthesis, as they do have well-developed prepro- cessing tools and organized text corpora. However, the methods for these lan- guages are not appropriate for non-concatenative languages such as Semitic languages. Moreover, most of the Semitic languages, except Arabic and He- brew, do not have well-developed text corpora and language processing tools. Hence, a novel approach that can cater for the root-pattern and rich morphology of these languages is necessary. This paper is therefore a comprehensive survey of the literature, an analysis motivating an innovative and generic morphologi- cal synthesis approach with illustrated architecture. It is part of a larger project tailored for designing an innovative, generic, approach to derivation lexicon de- velopment for Semitic languages. Keywords: Semitic Computational Morphology, Lexicon Design, Derivation Lexicon