Arabic-L:LING:COLING 2004 Call for Papers and Arabic Workshop

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Thu 29 Jan  2004
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1) Subject:COLING 2004 Call for Papers and Arabic Workshop

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1)
Date: 29 Jan 2004
From:Ali Farghaly <farghaly at systransoft.com>
Subject:COLING 2004 Call for Papers and Arabic Workshop

CALL FOR PAPERS

COLING 2004 Workshop
Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages

Saturday, August 28, 2004
University of Geneva
Geneva, Switzerland

Conference Website
http://www.issco.unige.ch/coling2004/

Workshop description

   Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the study of the
languages of the Middle East, especially Arabic, Persian (Farsi), Pashto
and Urdu. This sudden and urgent interest is manifested by the
availability of funding for rapid development of practical systems for
processing large volumes of data in these languages. Computational
applications for proper name identification, entity recognition,
categorization, information retrieval, summarization, machine
translation and other implementations are currently in high demand. This
comes at a time when advances in formal and computational linguistics
over the last fifty years are being consolidated, while work on machine
learning and statistical methods has been showing great promise.

   Although there exists a considerable body of work in computational
linguistics specifically targeted to these middle eastern languages,
much of the research and development has been the result of initiatives
by individual research establishments or industry firms. Furthermore,
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.

   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.
Solutions that are designed to solve the specific problems of these
languages could very well have wider applications and relevance to the
rest of the NLP community.

Workshop Topics

Authors of papers in any area of NLP in Arabic script-based languages
are encouraged to apply. We encourage submissions dealing with
language-specific issues, as well as discussions of challenges imposed
by the usage of the Arabic script. Papers could be on – but not limited
to – any of the following topics:

§	Morphological analysis
§	Syntactic ambiguity resolution
§	Relevance of shallow parsing
§	Machine translation from and to Arabic script languages
§	Sense disambiguation
§	Homograph resolution
§	Semantic analysis
§	Entity recognition
§	Information retrieval
§	Classification of documents
§	Text mining
§	Summarization
§	Statistical approaches
§	Speech recognition and generation
§	Lexical databases
§	Knowledge and domain representation
§	Spelling and grammar checking tools

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 AliFarghaly at aol.com and karinem at inxight.com 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.

Hardcopy submissions should be sent to:
Ali Farghaly
SYSTRAN Software, Inc.
9333 Genesee Ave, Pl 1
San Diego, CA 92121
USA

Important dates

Submissions due:	March 25th, 2004
Notification date:	April 25th, 2004
Deadline for camera ready copy:	May 25th, 2004

Organizing committee

This workshop is organized by
Ali Farghaly (SYSTRAN Software, Inc.)
Karine Megerdoomian (Inxight Software and University of California, San
Diego)

The call for papers as well as future information on the workshop can be
found at http://members.cox.net/karinem/COLING2004

Program Committee

Jan W. Amtrup		Bowne Global Solutions
Tim Buckwalter		Linguistic Data  Consortium
Violetta Cavalli-Sforza	Carnegie Mellon University
Joseph Dichy		Lyon University
Andrew Freeman		University of Washington
Nizar Habash		University of Maryland, College Park
Masayo Iida		Inxight Software, Inc.
Simin Karimi		University of Arizona
Martin Kay    		Stanford University
Kevin Knight		USC/Information Sciences Institute
Farhad Oroumchian	University of Wollongong in Dubai
Ahmed Rafea 		The American University in Cairo
Jean Sennellart		SYSTRAN Software
Rémi Zajac		SYSTRAN Software

Regards,
Ali Farghaly

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End of Arabic-L:  29 Jan  2004