Arabic-L:LING:Computational Approaches to Arabic Script Languages: CFP2

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Fri 12 Mar  2004
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1) Subject:Computational Approaches to Arabic Script Languages: CFP2

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1)
Date: 12 Mar 2004
From:Ali Farghaly <farghaly at systransoft.com>
Subject:Computational Approaches to Arabic Script Languages: CFP2

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           SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

         COLING 2004 WORKSHOP ON
COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO ARABIC SCRIPT-BASED LANGUAGES

         Geneva, Switzerland, 23-27 August 2004
         Submission Deadline: 25 March 2004
           http://members.cox.net/karinem/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, Kurdish 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 dealing with various
methodologies such as statistical approaches, shallow parsing and
linguistic-based analyses are encouraged. Submissions could also be on -
but not limited to - any of the following
topics:

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

Proposals for formal demonstrations of advanced operational systems as
well as research prototypes are welcome.

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

Papers should be original, previously unpublished work and should not
identify the author(s). They should be no longer than 8 pages (including
figures and references) and should emphasize completed work rather than
intended work. Papers that are being submitted to other conferences must
reflect this fact on the title page.

Demonstration proposals should give a short description of the system,
provide its technical specifications and indicate how the demonstration
illustrates new ideas and contributes to the computational work on
Arabic-script languages. The proposals are not to exceed 4 pages.

Email submissions (ps or pdf) are preferred and should be sent to both
AliFarghaly at aol.com and karinem at inxight.com. Submissions should be in
English. The papers should be attached to an email indicating contact
information for the author(s) and paper's title. The hardware, software
and network requirements for the system demonstrations should also be
indicated in the text of the email. 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

PROCEEDINGS AND WORKSHOP ORGANIZATION

Accepted papers and formal demonstrations will be published in a
proceedings volume. 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 site as soon as possible.

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
Abdel Kadir Fassi Fehri, Arabization Bureau, Rabat, Morocco
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 Senellart, SYSTRAN Software, Inc.
Bonnie Glover Stalls, University of Southern California
Rémi Zajac, SYSTRAN Software, Inc.

Regards,
Ali Farghaly

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End of Arabic-L:  12 Mar  2004