Arabic text data compression

With the recently uprising revolution of information technology,the progress accomplished in data storage and data communication hasshown significant advances. Data compression has become a verypowerful and handy tool to achieve an efficient data manipulationtechnique that can deal with the outgoing demands. Consequently therequest of more efficient compression techniques had put a burden on theresearcher/programmer’s shoulders. This actually led to the developmentof various compression techniques. These techniques compete to satisfythe spreading demands of many users. In one hand it is required tocompress the data to the minimum size it can reach, while on the otherhand it is required in most situations to reach the shortest compressiontime. These two factors are inversely proportional to each other. Thus onecan chose the parameters suitable for his application and try to live withthe other drawbacks or reduce it to the minimum.Nowadays dealing with Arabic language as one of the computer’swidely used language, imposes the need for comprehensive research inthis area. In this thesis a study of Arabic text data compression wascompleted. This includes using different compression techniques andvarious text types. Also a comparison between Arabic and English textswas conducted to explore performance of the two different languages.This thesis surveys a variety of data compression methodsspanning almost fifty years of research. It covers the work of Shannonand Huffinan as a start, passes through the dictionary techniques based onZiv Lempel and ends with the predictive techniques. In between a tourthrough other techniques such as delta encoding and RLE was done.