Installing CAMeL Tools (Linux/macOS)

CAMeL Tools is an Arabic NLP library developed by the CAMeL Lab at NYU Abu Dhabi. It provides proper morphological analysis for Arabic, recognizing that الكتاب and كتاب share the same lemma — something the Simple Space Splitter cannot do.

From the Anki Tools menu, navigate to AnkiMorphs → CAMeL Tools Manager.

Step 1: Install CAMeL Tools

System requirements (per the CAMeL Tools installation docs):

• Python 3.11–3.14, 64-bit (Anki’s bundled Python must meet this requirement)
• The Rust compiler must be installed before clicking Install
• cmake and boost must be installed before clicking Install
  • macOS: brew install cmake boost
  • Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt-get install cmake libboost-all-dev

Note: CAMeL Tools downloads and installs ~5.5 GB of dependencies.

Click Install CAMeL Tools. This downloads and installs CAMeL Tools into a dedicated virtual environment inside your Anki add-ons folder. After installation completes, restart Anki.

Step 2: Install a Database

After restarting Anki, open the CAMeL Tools Manager again. The databases list shows the available Arabic morphology databases:

After installation completes, restart Anki again. The morphemizer will now appear in the Settings → Note Filter dropdown as e.g. CAMeL Tools: Egyptian Arabic.

Purging CAMeL Tools

Click Purge CAMeL Tools to remove the entire CAMeL Tools virtual environment and databases.

License Note

The MSA and Egyptian Arabic databases (calima-msa-r13, calima-egy-r13) are derived from the ALMOR database distributed with MADAMIRA (Columbia University) and are licensed under GPL v2. The Gulf Arabic database (calima-glf-01) is licensed under CC BY 4.0. The CAMeL Tools Python library itself is MIT licensed. Users download the databases directly from the CAMeL Tools data repository.