Hebrew Computational Linguistics: Past and Future Shuly Wintner Department of Computer Science University of Haifa shuly@cs.haifa.ac.il Abstract This paper reviews the current state of the art in Natural Language Processing for Hebrew, both theoretical and practical. The Hebrew language, like other Semitic languages, poses special challenges for developers of programs for natural language processing: the writing system, rich morphology, unique word formation process of roots and patterns, lack of linguistic corpora that document language usage, all contribute to making computational approaches to Hebrew challenging. The paper briefly reviews the field of computational linguistics and the problems it addresses, describes the special difficulties inherent to Hebrew (as well as to other Semitic languages), surveys a wide variety of past and ongoing works and attempts to characterize future needs and possible solutions. 1 Introduction Computational linguistics is a research area that lies in the intersection of linguistics and computer science. It can be viewed in two ways: on one hand, it is the application of various techniques and results from computer science to linguistics, in order to investigate such fundamental problems as what people know when they know a natural language, what they do when they use this knowledge, and how they acquire this knowledge in the first place. On the other, it is the application of various techniques and results from linguistics to computer science, in order to provide such novel products as computers that can understand everyday human speech, translate between different human languages, and otherwise interact linguistically with people in ways that suit people rather than computers. This latter view is usually known as Natural Language Processing (NLP). Examples of NLP applications include machine translation from one natural language to another; con- version of speech to text and text to speech; natural language interfaces for computational systems; automatic summarization of documents; spelling and style checking; etc. We concentrate in this paper on natural lan- guage processing applications for the Hebrew language. We show that Hebrew poses additional problems for developers of programs for language processing, mainly due to its rich morphology and deficient script. In the next section we briefly review the field of computational linguistics and the problems it deals with, emphasizing the special problems involved in processing the Hebrew language. Section 3 surveys existing systems developed for Hebrew; to the best of our knowledge, this survey covers all works published to date. Finally, section 4 attempts to identify future needs and suggest directions for future progress. 1