Dr. Khaled Abdel Ghaffar, the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, received a report submitted by Dr. Sherine Abdel Qader Muharram, Acting President of the Electronics Research Institute, about the organization of the Institute's Informatics Research Department, a workshop entitled "Computing the Arabic Language: Challenges and Opportunities", at the Institute's headquarters in Nozha.

The report indicated that the organization of the workshop stated under framework of the celebration of the International Day of the Arabic Language, by presenting and discussing developments in the field of computing the Arabic language, allowing access to the latest technologies in this field, identify the challenges that face, and create opportunities for cooperation with partners.

The report emphasized that there has been a strong demand in the recent period to learn Arabic by some speakers of other languages, and that is why some Arab countries, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have adopted some specialized programs for teaching Arabic to non-native speakers, using modern technologies such as computers, information technology and networks.

The workshop touched on the fact that the Arabic language did not receive the in-depth studies or the optimal use required by computer users, This is because of the gap between computer users and linguists, which consequently caused a gap or barrier between the Arabic speaker and other sciences and knowledge, Although the number of researches in computerized Arabic language processing has recently become more than before, the digital Arabic content on the Internet is still very small, almost not reaching 3% of the global digital content, Although Arabic speakers exceeded 400 million people around the world, which is approximately 7% of the population of the earth, This is according to the study and statistics recently issued and presented by the "Arab Thought Foundation" under the auspices of the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Dr. Sherine pointed out that the field of computing the Arabic language deals with many techniques, such as analyzing texts, extracting important information from them, summarizing them, machine translation, and synthesizing sentences and texts, and such technologies have many applications in different fields, such as news, education, and e-blogging, which are research areas that the Electronics Research Institute is working on.

At the conclusion of the workshop, Dr. Sherine announced holding this forum in the month of December every year; To open avenues of cooperation in the field of Arab innovation to enrich Arab digital content and stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship in the Arab region.

The online activities of the workshop were witnessed by a group of professors and scholars in the field of computing the Arabic language, including Dr. Salwa Al-Ramly, former head of the Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University, President of the Egyptian Society of Language Engineering, dr. Ali Fahmy, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Former Dean of the Faculty of Computers and Information, Cairo University, Dr. Mohsen Rashwan is a professor in the Department of Electronics and Electrical Communications, Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University, from the sisterly Arab countries dr. Muhammad Zaki, formerly Professor of Artificial Intelligence, University of Jordan, Dr. Omar Mehdioui, Professor of Language Engineering, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Meknes, Moulay Ismail University, Kingdom of Morocco and Dr. Nael Muhammad Ismail, Ph.D. in linguistics in Palestine.