~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ INFOS 2008: The 6th International Conference on Informatics and Systems Special Track On Natural Language Processing 27 – 28 March, 2008 Cairo, Egypt http://www.fci.cu.edu.eg/INFOS2008/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Natural language processing research is gaining much interest from many parties such as researchers from academia, industry, and government developers, practitioners, and users. The goal of this track session(s) is to provide the participants with an opportunity to exchange ideas, approaches and implementations of computational systems, to highlight the common challenges faced by all practitioners, to assess the state of the art in the field, and to identify promising areas for future collaborative research in the development of NLP resources and systems. Topics ===== The following is a non-exhaustive list of topics covered by the track: * Ontologies and linguistic resources (corpora, electronic dictionaries, treebanks, etc.) * Transliteration, transcription and diacritization * Part of speech tagging * Morphological analysis and generation * Shallow and deep parsing * Machine translation * Word sense and syntactic disambiguation * Semantic analysis * Information retrieval * Information extraction * Question answering * Text clustering and classification * Text summarization * Text and web content mining * Named entity recognition * Arabic script-based language processing Invited Speaker ============ Prof. Ali Farghaly, Senior Member of Technical Staff, Text Group, Oracle USA, CA, and Adjunct Professor of Arabic Linguistics, Monterey Institute of International Studies, Monterey, CA, USA. Track Chair ========= Prof. Khaled Shaalan (Faculty of Computers & Information, Cairo University, Egypt) Program Committee Nahed Aboelhassan (Brandeis University, USA) Fawaz Al-Anzi (Kuwait University, Kuwait) Ibrahim Alkharashi (King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia) Galia Angelova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria) Achraf Chalabi (Sakhr, Egypt) Chia-Hui Chang (National Central University, Taiwan) Kareem Darwish (Cairo University, Egypt) Mona Diab (Columbia University, USA) Joseph Dichy (Université Lumière-Lyon 2, France) Ahmed Guessoum (Freelance Consultant, Algeria) Nizar Habash (Columbia University, USA) Lamia Hadrich Belguith (Faculty of Economic Sciences and Management of Sfax, Tunisia) Sattar Izwaini (Abu Dhabi University, UAE) Mohammed Kayed (Beni-Sueif University, Egypt) Shereen khoja (Pacific University, USA) Petra Maier-Meyer (FAST, Germany) Farid Meziane (Salford University, UK) Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton, UK) Farhad Oroumchian (University of Wollongong in Dubai, UAE) Ahmed Rafea (American University in Cairo, Egypt) Doaa Samy (Universidad Carlos III Madrid, Spain) Otakar Smrz (Charles University, Czech Republic) Abdelhadi Soudi (Ecole Nationale de l’Industrie Minérale, Morocco) Hissam Tawfik (Liverpool Hope University, UK) Henry Thompson (University of Edinburgh, UK) Imed Zitouni (IBM, USA) Conference URL www.fci.cu.edu.eg/INFOS2008/ Important Dates Full Paper submission due: 30 December 2007 Notification of acceptance: 30 January 2008 Camera ready submissions: 15 February 2008 For Further Information Prof. Khaled Shaalan, k.shaalan@fci-cu.edu.eg