Call for Papers

[Ali Farghaly]

* FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS *

                       SECOND WORKSHOP ON
COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO ARABIC SCRIPT-BASED LANGUAGES (CAASL-2)


July 21-22, 2007
LSA 2007 Linguistic Institute
Stanford University, California, USA
http://www.zoorna.org/CAASL2

 
The first workshop on "Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based
Languages", held in conjunction with COLING 2004, brought together
researchers working on the computer processing of Arabic script-based
languages such as Arabic, Persian (Farsi and Dari), Pashto, Urdu and
Kurdish. The usage of the Arabic script and the influence of Arabic
vocabulary give rise to certain computational issues that are common to
all these languages despite their being of distinct language families,
such as right to left direction, encoding variation, absence of
capitalization, complex word structure, and a high degree of ambiguity
due to non-representation of short vowels in the writing system. 

The proposed second workshop, three years after the successful first
workshop, will provide a forum for researchers from academia, industry,
and government developers, practitioners, and users to share their
research and experience. The goal of the workshop 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 for Arabic
script languages. This second workshop also provides an opportunity to
assess the progress that has been made since the first workshop in
2004.

This workshop is being held in conjunction with the LSA 2007 Linguistic
Institute at Stanford University. 


WORKSHOP TOPICS 

Authors of papers in any area of NLP in Arabic script-based languages
are invited to apply. We also accept proposals for demonstrations of
computational systems. Preference would be given to papers that extend
their results and analyses to other Arabic script-based languages.
Papers and demos could be on - but not limited to - any of the
following topics: 

* Knowledge bases, corpora, and development of resources 
* Transliteration, transcription and diacritization 
* Morphological analysis 
* Syntactic ambiguity resolution 
* Shallow and deep parsing 
* Machine translation from and to Arabic script languages 
* Sense disambiguation 
* Homograph resolution 
* Semantic analysis 
* Semantic web and inferences 
* Named entity recognition 
* Information retrieval 
* Text mining 
* Summarization 
* Text-to-speech systems 

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS 

Papers should be original, previously unpublished work and should not
identify the author(s). They should emphasize completed work rather
than intended work. Papers that are being submitted to other
conferences must reflect this fact on the title page. 

Submissions should be no longer than 8 pages (including figures and
references). Email submissions (ps or pdf) are preferred and should be
sent to both Ali.Farghaly at oracle.com and karine at mitre.org by midnight
of the due date. Submissions should be in English. The papers should be
attached to an email indicating contact information for the author(s)
and paper's title. Formatting requirements for the final version of
accepted papers will be posted as soon as they become available. 

IMPORTANT DATES 

Submissions due: February 26, 2007 
Notification of acceptance: April 16, 2007 
Camera ready submissions: June 15, 2007 

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Richard Sproat (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE 

Ali Farghaly, Oracle USA, Ali.Farghaly at oracle.com 
Karine Megerdoomian, The MITRE Corporation, karine at mitre.org 

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

As of December 7, the following have accepted to participate in the
program committee:

Jan W. Amtrup (Kofax Image Products)
Mona Diab (Columbia University)
Sherri Condon (The MITRE Corporation)
Nizar Habash (Columbia University)
Mohammad Haji-Abdolhosseini (Iowa State University)
Kevin Knight (USC/Information Sciences Institute)
Farhad Oroumchian (University of Wollongong in Dubai)
Ahmed Rafea (The American University in Cairo)
Imed Zitouni (IBM)
* FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS *

                       SECOND WORKSHOP ON
COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO ARABIC SCRIPT-BASED LANGUAGES (CAASL-2)


July 21-22, 2007
LSA 2007 Linguistic Institute
Stanford University, California, USA
http://www.zoorna.org/CAASL2

 
The first workshop on "Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based
Languages", held in conjunction with COLING 2004, brought together
researchers working on the computer processing of Arabic script-based
languages such as Arabic, Persian (Farsi and Dari), Pashto, Urdu and
Kurdish. The usage of the Arabic script and the influence of Arabic
vocabulary give rise to certain computational issues that are common to
all these languages despite their being of distinct language families,
such as right to left direction, encoding variation, absence of
capitalization, complex word structure, and a high degree of ambiguity
due to non-representation of short vowels in the writing system. 

The proposed second workshop, three years after the successful first
workshop, will provide a forum for researchers from academia, industry,
and government developers, practitioners, and users to share their
research and experience. The goal of the workshop 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 for Arabic
script languages. This second workshop also provides an opportunity to
assess the progress that has been made since the first workshop in
2004.

This workshop is being held in conjunction with the LSA 2007 Linguistic
Institute at Stanford University. 


WORKSHOP TOPICS 

Authors of papers in any area of NLP in Arabic script-based languages
are invited to apply. We also accept proposals for demonstrations of
computational systems. Preference would be given to papers that extend
their results and analyses to other Arabic script-based languages.
Papers and demos could be on - but not limited to - any of the
following topics: 

* Knowledge bases, corpora, and development of resources 
* Transliteration, transcription and diacritization 
* Morphological analysis 
* Syntactic ambiguity resolution 
* Shallow and deep parsing 
* Machine translation from and to Arabic script languages 
* Sense disambiguation 
* Homograph resolution 
* Semantic analysis 
* Semantic web and inferences 
* Named entity recognition 
* Information retrieval 
* Text mining 
* Summarization 
* Text-to-speech systems 

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS 

Papers should be original, previously unpublished work and should not
identify the author(s). They should emphasize completed work rather
than intended work. Papers that are being submitted to other
conferences must reflect this fact on the title page. 

Submissions should be no longer than 8 pages (including figures and
references). Email submissions (ps or pdf) are preferred and should be
sent to both Ali.Farghaly at oracle.com and karine at mitre.org by midnight
of the due date. Submissions should be in English. The papers should be
attached to an email indicating contact information for the author(s)
and paper's title. Formatting requirements for the final version of
accepted papers will be posted as soon as they become available. 

IMPORTANT DATES 

Submissions due: February 26, 2007 
Notification of acceptance: April 16, 2007 
Camera ready submissions: June 15, 2007 

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Richard Sproat (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE 

Ali Farghaly, Oracle USA, Ali.Farghaly at oracle.com 
Karine Megerdoomian, The MITRE Corporation, karine at mitre.org 

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

As of November 30th, the following have accepted to participate in the
program committee:

Jan W. Amtrup (Kofax Image Products)
Mona Diab (Columbia University)
Sherri Condon (The MITRE Corporation)
Nizar Habash (Columbia University)
Mohammad Haji-Abdolhosseini (Iowa State University)
Kevin Knight (USC/Information Sciences Institute)
Farhad Oroumchian (University of Wollongong in Dubai)
Ahmed Rafea (The American University in Cairo)
Imed Zitouni (IBM)
Violetta Cavalli-Sforza Carnegie Mellon University
Joseph Dichy  Lyon University