<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Arabic-L: Thu 17 Jan 2008</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <<a href="mailto:dilworth_parkinson@byu.edu">dilworth_parkinson@byu.edu</a>></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">[To post messages to the list, send them to <a href="mailto:arabic-l@byu.edu">arabic-l@byu.edu</a>]</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">[To unsubscribe, send message from same address you subscribed from to</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="mailto:listserv@byu.edu">listserv@byu.edu</a> with first line reading:</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "> unsubscribe arabic-l ]</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">-------------------------Directory------------------------------------</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">1) Subject:Arabic NLP workshop</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">-------------------------Messages-----------------------------------</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">1)</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Date: 17 Jan 2008</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">From:<a href="mailto:prosso@dsic.upv.es">prosso@dsic.upv.es</a></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Subject:Arabic NLP workshop</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br>*HLT & NLP within the Arabic world: Arabic Language and *<br><br>*local** languages processing: Status Updates and Prospects*<br><br>Please refer to <a href="http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/Workshops.html">http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/Workshops.html</a> for details.<br><br>*_ _*<br><br>*_Motivation and Aims_*<br><br><br>This Workshop intends to add value to the issues addressed during the main conference<br>(Human Language Technologies (HLT) & Natural Language Processing (NLP)) and enhance the<br>work carried out at different places to process Arabic language(s) and more generally<br>Semitic languages and other local and foreign languages spoken in the region.<br><br>It should bring together people who are actively involved in Arabic Written and Spoken<br>language processing in a mono- or cross/multilingual context, and give them an<br>opportunity to update the community through reports on completed and ongoing work as well<br>as on the availability of LRs, evaluation protocols and campaigns, products and core<br>technologies (in particular open source ones). This should enable the participants to<br>develop a common view on where we stand with respect to these particular set of languages<br>and to foster the discussion of the future of this research area. Particular attention<br>will be paid to activities involving technologies such as Machine Translation,<br>Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval/extraction, Summarization, Speech to text<br>transcriptions, etc., and languages such as Arabic varieties, Amazigh, Amharic, Hebrew,<br>Maltese, and other local languages. Evaluation methodologies and resources for evaluation<br>of HLT are also a main focus.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br>*_Topics of Interest_*<br><br>The submissions should address some of the following issues:<br><br>· Issues in the design, the acquisition, creation, management, access,<br>distribution, use of Language Resources (Standard Arabic, Colloquial Arabic, other<br>Semitic languages, Amazigh, Coptic, Maltese, English/French spoken locally, etc.)<br><br>· Impact on LR collections/processing and NLP of the crucial issues related to<br>"code switching" between different dialects and languages<br><br>· Specific issues related to the above-mentioned languages such as role of<br>morphology, named entities, corpus alignment, etc.)<br><br>· Multilinguality issues including relationship between Colloquial and Standard<br>Arabic<br><br>· Exploitation of LR in different types of applications · Industrial LR<br>requirements and community's response;<br><br>· Benchmarking of systems and products; resources for benchmarking and evaluation<br>for written and spoken language processing;<br><br>· Focus on some key technologies such as MT (all approaches e.g. Statistical,<br>Example-Based, etc.), Information Retrieval, Speech Recognition, Spoken Documents<br>Retrieval, CLIR, Question-Answering, Summarization,<br><br>· Local, regional, and international activities and projects;<br><br>· Needs, possibilities, forms, initiatives of/for regional and international<br>cooperation.<br><br><br>*_Submission Details (more on <a href="http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/Workshops.html)_*">http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/Workshops.html)_*</a><br><br><br>Submissions must be in English. Abstracts for workshop contributions should not exceed<br>Four A4 pages (excluding references). An additional title page should state: the title;<br>author(s); affiliation(s); and contact author's e-mail address, as well as postal<br>address, telephone and fax numbers.<br><br>Submission is to be sent by email, preferably in Postscript or PDF format, to:<br><a href="mailto:arabic@elda.org">arabic@elda.org</a> <<a href="mailto:choukri@elda.org&amp;amp;gt">mailto:choukri@elda.org&amp;amp;gt</a>; to arrive before *_15 February<br>2008_*.<br>Registration to LREC'08 will be required for participation, so potential participants are<br>invited to refer to the main conference website for all details not covered in the<br>present call (<a href="http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/">http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/</a>)<br><br><br>*_Important Dates_*<br><br>Call for papers: 3 January 2008<br><br>Deadline for abstract submissions: 15 February 2008<br><br>Notification of acceptance: 14 March 2008<br><br>Final version of accepted paper: 11 April 2008<br><br>Workshop full-day: Saturday 31^st May 2008<br><br><br>*_Workshop chair_*<br><br>Khalid Choukri (ELRA/ELDA, France)<br><br>*_Workshop Co-chairs_*<br><br>Mona Diab, Columbia University, USA<br><br>Bente Maegaard (CST, University of Copenhagen, Denmark)<br><br>Paolo Rosso, Universidad Politécnica Valencia, Spain<br><br>Abdelhadi Soudi ENIM (Morocco)<br><br>Ali Farghaly, Oracle USA and Monterey Institute of International Studies<br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">--------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">End of Arabic-L: 17 Jan 2008</div></body></html>