Google celebrated last Friday the birth anniversary of Nabil Ali, the pioneer of Arabic Computational Linguistics, featuring him in a doodle on the search engine.
Google described Ali’s innovations in computational linguistics, as the Arab world’s first step into the Information Age.
Working for over 20 years as an engineer with the Egyptian Air Force and with various computer and electronic companies around the globe, Ali created programmes that enabled computers to understand Arabic in digital form.
He believed that digitisation of the Arabic language is the way to connect Arabic speakers with the rest of the world.
Ali was born in Cairo, 3 January 1938, studied at Cairo University, and received PhD in Aeronautical Engineering. Ali published several papers, books, and technical reports in order to support the developments he made in the field of computational linguistics.
He also won several awards, including the prestigious Saudi Arabian award, the King Faisal Prize, in 2012, recognising his pioneering contributions to the Arabic Language and Literature.
