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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Note corrected workshop date. We apologize for any double-postings.</FONT>
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<P> <FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS"> ** Call for Participation **</FONT>
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<P> <FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">COLING 2004 WORKSHOP ON</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO ARABIC SCRIPT-BASED LANGUAGES</FONT>
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<P> <FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS"> Geneva, Switzerland, 28 August 2004</FONT>
<BR> <FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS"> Invited Speaker: Martin Kay (Stanford University)</FONT>
<BR> <FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS"> <A HREF="http://members.cox.net/karinem/COLING2004">http://members.cox.net/karinem/COLING2004</A></FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">WORKSHOP THEME </FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the study of the languages of the Middle East, especially Arabic, Persian (Farsi), Pashto, Kurdish and Urdu. The usage of the Arabic script gives rise to certain issues that are common to all these languages despite their being of distinct language families. Hence, these languages share properties such as the absence of capitalization, right to left direction, lack of clear word boundaries, complex word structure, a high degree of ambiguity due to non-representation of short vowels in the writing system, and related encoding issues. Yet the research on these various languages have rarely been brought together in a single forum, and most development has been the result of initiatives by individual research establishments or industry firms. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for those involved in the development of NLP systems in Arabic script languages to exchange ideas, approaches and implementations of computational systems; to discuss the common challenges faced by all practitioners; and to assess the state of the art in the field. In addition, one of the aims of the workshop is to identify promising areas for future collaborative research in the development of NLP systems for Arabic script languages. </FONT></P>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">WORKSHOP PROGRAM </FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">I. Opening and Overview</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">8:30-9:00 Computer Processing of Arabic Script-based Languages: Current State and Future Directions - Ali Farghaly </FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">II. Session 1: Lexicon and Corpora</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">9:00-9:30 Developing an Arabic Treebank: Methods, Guidelines, Procedures, and Tools - Mohamed Maamouri and Ann Bies </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">9:30-10:00 Preliminary Lexical Framework for English-Arabic Semantic Resource Construction - Anne R. Diekema </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">10:00-10:30 The Architecture of a Standard Arabic Lexical Database: Some Figures, Ratios, and Categories from the DIINAR.1 Source Program - Ramzi Abbès, Joseph Dichy and Mohamed Hassoun </FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">10:30-10:45 Break</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">III. Session 2: Morphology</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">10:45-11:15 Systematic Verb Stem Generation for Arabic - Jim Yaghi and Sane Yagi </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">11:15-11:45 Issues in Arabic Orthography and Morphology Analysis - Tim Buckwalter </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">11:45-12:15 Finite-State Morphological Analysis of Persian - Karine Megerdoomian </FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">12:15-2:00 Lunch & Demo Sessions</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">IV. Demonstrations </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Urdu Localization Project - Sarmad Hussain </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">FarsiSum: A Persian Text Summarizer - Martin Hassel and Nima Mazdak </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Stemming the Qur'an - Naglaa Thabet </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Language Weaver Arabic->English MT - Daniel Marcu, Alex Fraser, William Wong and Kevin Knight </FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">V. Invited Speaker </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">2:00-2:45 Arabic Script-Based Languages Deserve to be Studied Linguistically - Martin Kay </FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">VI. Session 3: Statistical Approaches</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">2:45-3:15 An Unsupervised Approach for Bootstrapping Arabic Sense Tagging - Mona T. Diab </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">3:15-3:45 Automatic Arabic Document Categorization Based on the Naive Bayes Algorithm - Mohamed El Kourdi, Amine Bensaid and Tajje-eddine Rachidi </FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">3:45-4:00 Break</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">VII. Session 4: Speech Processing </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">4:00-4:30 A Transcription Scheme for Languages Employing the Arabic Script Motivated by Speech Processing Applications - Shadi Ganjavi, Panayiotis G. Georgiou and Shrikanth Narayanan </FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">4:30-5:00 Automatic Diacritization of Arabic for Acoustic Modeling in Speech Recognition - Dimitra Vergyri and Katrin Kirchhoff </FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">5:00-5:30 Letter-to-Sound Conversion for Urdu Text-to-Speech System - Sarmad Hussain </FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">VIII. Discussion and Closing</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">5:30-6:00 Ali Farghaly and Karine Megerdoomian </FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Accepted papers and formal demonstrations will be published in a proceedings volume, which will be made available at the workshop. </FONT></P>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">WORKSHOP REGISTRATION </FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">For the workshops to take place, the COLING 2004 organizers require at least 20 participants to register for the workshop. Speakers and participants are therefore asked to register via the official Coling 2004 website as soon as possible by visiting <A HREF="http://www.issco.unige.ch/coling2004/">http://www.issco.unige.ch/coling2004/</A>. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Workshop fees (in Swiss Francs): </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">* Student early chf 90 </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">* Student late chf 120 </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">* Student on-site chf 150 </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">* Regular early chf 120 </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">* Regular late chf 150 </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">* Regular on-site chf 180 </FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">ORGANIZING COMMITTEE </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS"> </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Ali Farghaly (SYSTRAN Software, Inc.) </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Karine Megerdoomian (Inxight Software and University of California, San Diego) </FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">PROGRAM COMMITTEE </FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Jan W. Amtrup (Bowne Global Solutions) </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Tim Buckwalter (Linguistic Data Consortium) </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Miriam Butt (Konstanz University, Germany) </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Violetta Cavalli-Sforza (Carnegie Mellon University) </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Joseph Dichy (Lyon University) </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Abdelkadir Fassi Fehri (Mohammed V University-Souissi Rabat, Morocco) </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Andrew Freeman (University of Washington) </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Nizar Habash (University of Maryland, College Park) </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Masayo Iida (Inxight Software, Inc) </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Simin Karimi (University of Arizona) </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Martin Kay (Stanford University) </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Kevin Knight (USC/Information Sciences Institute) </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Farhad Oroumchian (University of Wollongong in Dubai) </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Ahmed Rafea (The American University in Cairo) </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Jean Senellart (SYSTRAN Software) </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Bonnie Glover Stalls (University of Southern California) </FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Comic Sans MS">Rémi Zajac (SYSTRAN Software) </FONT>
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