On Arabic texts compression and searching

With the dramatic increasing of electronic Arabic content, the text compression techniques will play a major role in several domains and applications such as search engines, data archiving, searching and retrieval from huge databases. Mainly the combination of compression and indexing techniques allows the interesting possibility to work directly on the compressed textual files or databases, which results saving time and resources. The existing compression techniques and tools are generic and do not consider the specific characteristics of the Arabic language such as its derivative nature. Mainly compression techniques should be based on the morphology characteristics of the Arabic language, its grammatical characteristics, the texts subject, and their statistical characteristics. The paper surveys the state of the art of the Arabic texts compression techniques and tools and identifies some research tracks that should be explored in future. It presents also some dedicated Arabic text compression algorithms which save more physical space and speed up the data retrieval text files by searching in their compressed form.