Abstract
Measuring the similarity between strings plays an increasingly important role in many applications such as information retrieval, short answer grading, and conversational agent software. There has been much recent research interest in applying string similarity within Arabic language applications; however, the use of string similarity in Arabic poses a substantial challenge such as the complexity of the morphological system, ambiguity, and lack of resources. This survey discusses the existing research into string similarity approaches and the difficulties posed by the Arabic language by dividing them into three approaches; lexical-based similarity, semantic-based similarity, and hybrid similarity. The aim of this paper is to review these approaches and to identify suitable approaches with Arabic language.