Scientists developing software to scan Arabic documents.

CNN.com reports that computer scientists are developing software to scan Arabic documents, including handwritten ones, for specific words and phrases. The software should expand access to modern and ancient Arabic manuscripts as well as help with intelligence gathering. It will allow Arabic writings to be digitized and posted on the Web.

"The whole Internet is skewed toward people who speak English," said Venu Govindaraju, director of the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors at the University at Buffalo in New York, where the software is being developed.

He explained that if optical character recognition software is not developed for a particular language, "then all the classic texts in that language will disappear into oblivion.

Bill Young, an Arab language specialist at the University of Maryland, told CNN that the software could help scan through masses of typed pages for specific names or words; however, handwritten Arabic presents serious challenges for computers. Some Arabic words can be written in more than one way, so the software would have to be given instructions about possible variations.

According to Govindaraju, the Arabic software would take into account the fact that characters may take different forms depending on where within a word they appear, and that Arabic vowels are pronounced but often not written.