Third Wokshop on Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages

[Ali Farghaly]

                  * FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS *
 
                     THIRD WORKSHOP ON
COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO ARABIC SCRIPT-BASED LANGUAGES (CAASL3)

August 26, 2009
Machine Translation Summit XII
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
http://arabicscript.org/CAASL3
 
The Organizing Committee of the Third Workshop on Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages invites proposals for presentation at CAASL3, being held in conjunction with MT Summit XII. 
 
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION 
 
The first two workshops (2004 and 2007) brought together researchers working on the computer processing of Arabic script-based languages such as Arabic, Persian (Farsi and Dari), Pashto and Urdu, among others. The usage of the Arabic script and the influence of Arabic vocabulary give rise to certain computational issues that are common to 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 third workshop (CAASL3), five 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 with a focus on machine translation.  It also provides an opportunity to assess the progress that has been made since the first workshop in 2004.
 
The call for papers as well as future information on the workshop can be found at http://www.arabicscript.org.
 
IMPORTANT DATES 
 
Paper submission deadline: May 8, 2009 
Notification of acceptance: June 12, 2009 
Camera ready submissions: July 10, 2009
 
WORKSHOP TOPICS 
 
We welcome submissions in any area of NLP in Arabic script-based languages. However, preference would be given to papers that focus on Machine Translation applications of Arabic script-based languages. The main themes of this workshop include:
 
	* Statistical and rule-based machine translation 
	* Translation aids 
	* Evaluation methods and techniques of  machine translation systems 
	* MT of dialectal and conversational language 
	* Computer-mediated communication (e.g., blogs, forums, chats) 
	* Knowledge bases, corpora, and development of resources for MT applications 
	* Speech-to-speech MT 
	* MT combined with other technologies (speech translation, cross-language information retrieval, multilingual text categorization, multilingual text summarization, multilingual natural language generation, etc.) 
	* Entity extraction 
	* Tokenization and segmentation 
	* Speech synthesis and recognition 
	* Text to speech systems 
	* Semantic analysis 
 
SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS                                                  
 
Papers should not have been presented somewhere else or be under consideration for publication elsewhere, and should not identify the author(s). They should emphasize completed work rather than intended work. Each paper will be anonymously reviewed by three members of the program committee.
 
Papers must be submitted in PDF format to caasl3 at arabicscript.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. Papers should not exceed 8 pages including references and tables, and should follow the formatting guidelines posted at 
 
CONTACT INFORMATION
 
For further information, please visit the workshop site at http://www.arabicscript.org/CAASL3 or contact the organizing committee at caasl3 at arabicscript.org.
 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
 
Ali Farghaly, Oracle USA
Karine Megerdoomian,  The Mitre Corporation
Hassan Sawaf, AppTek Inc. 
 
TENTATIVE PROGRAM COMMITTEE
 
Jan W. Amtrup (Kofax Image Products)
Mahmood Bijankhan (Tehran University, Iran)
Tim Buckwalter (University of Maryland)
Miriam Butt (Konstanz University, Germany)
Violetta Cavalli-Sforza (Al Akhawayn University, Morocco)
Sherri L. Condon (The MITRE Corporation)
Kareem Darwish (Cairo University, Egypt and IBM)
Mona Diab (Columbia University)
Joseph Dichy (Lyon University)
Andrew Freeman (The MITRE Corporation)
Nizar Habash (Columbia University)
Lamia Hadrich Belguith (University of Sfax, Tunisia)
Hany Hassan (IBM)
Sarmad Hussain (CRULP and FAST National University, Pakistan)
Simin Karimi (University of Arizona)
Martin Kay (Stanford University)
Mohamed Maamouri (Linguistic Data Consortium)
Shrikanth Narayanan (University of Southern California)
Hermann Ney (RWTH Aachen, Germany)
Farhad Oroumchian (University of Wollongong in Dubai)
Nick Pendar (H5 Technologies)
Kristin Precoda (SRI International)
Jean Sennellart (SYSTRAN)
Ahmed Rafea (The American University in Cairo)
Khaled Shaalan (The British University in Dubai)
Mehrnoush Shamsfard (Shahid Beheshti University, Iran)
Stephan Vogel (CMU)
Imed Zitouni (IBM)