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

[Dilworth Parkinson]

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arabic-L: Mon 16 Jul 2007
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
[To post messages to the list, send them to arabic-l at byu.edu]
[To unsubscribe, send message from same address you subscribed from to
listserv at byu.edu with first line reading:
            unsubscribe arabic-l                                      ]

-------------------------Directory------------------------------------

1) Subject:Computational Approaches to Arabic Script Based Languages

-------------------------Messages-----------------------------------
1)
Date: 16 Jul 2007
From:"Megerdoomian, Karine" <karine at mitre.org>
Subject:Computational Approaches to Arabic Script Based Languages

********** CALL FOR PARTICIPATION **********

				     THE 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


DESCRIPTION
=============

The workshop aims to bring 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 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 held at
Coling 2004.

This year's keynote speaker is Prof. Richard Sproat (University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).

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


WORKSHOP PROGRAM
=================

Detailed program available at http://www.zoorna.org/CAASL2/program.html

----------------------------------
DAY 1: Saturday, July 21st, 2007
----------------------------------

"Computer processing of Arabic script-based languages: Current state
and future directions", Ali Farghaly and Karine Megerdoomian

"Urdu morphology, orthography and lexicon extraction", Muhammad
Humayoun (University of Savoy), Harald Hammarström and Aarne Ranta
(Chalmers University of Technology)

"Generating Arabic text from Interlingua", Khaled Shaalan (The British
University in Dubai), Ahmed Rafea (American University in Cairo), Azza
Abdelmonem (Central Lab for Agricultural Expert Systems in Egypt), and
Hoda Baraka (Cairo University)

Invited Speaker: "Named entity transliteration in a variety of
scripts", by Richard Sproat (University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign)

"Information retrieval and the Arabic noun construct", Ali Farghaly
(Oracle USA)

"Using OWA fuzzy operator to merge retrieval systems", Hadi Amiri,
Farhad Oroumchian, Caro Lucas, and Masoud Rahgozar (University of
Tehran)

"A note on extracting 'sentiments' in financial news in English, Arabic
and Urdu", Yousif Almas (University of Surrey) and Khurshid Ahmad
(Trinity College)

"The first parallel multilingual corpus of Persian: Towards a Persian
BLARK", Behrang Qasemizadeh (Text and Speech Technology LTD), Saeed
Rahimi (Text and Speech Technology LTD/University of Tehran), and
Behrooz Mahmoodi Bakhtiari (University of Tehran)

"Supervised lexical acquisition for Persian from a web corpus", Nick
Pendar (Iowa State University) and Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds)

"A rule-based semantic role labeling approach for Persian sentences",
Mahrnoush Shamsfard (Shahid Beheshti University) and Maryam Sadrmousavi
(Azad University in Tehran)

----------------------------------
DAY 2: Sunday, July 22nd, 2007
----------------------------------

"The challenges and pitfalls of Arabic romanization and arabization",
Jack Halpern (CJK Dictionary Institute, Inc.)

"Transcription of names written in Farsi into English", Joshua Johnson
(Inxight Software, Inc.)

"Automatic transliteration of proper nouns from Arabic to English",
Mehdi M. Kashani, Fred Popowich, and Anoop Sarkar (Simon Fraser
University)
   	
"Implementation of reverse chain mechanism in Pango for rendering
Nastaliq script", Aamir Wali (University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign) and Shafiq-ur Rahman (National University of Computer
and Emerging Sciences at Lahore)

"Frame approach to Persian verb generation for educational purposes",
Artem Lukanin (South Ural State University) and Constance Bobroff
(University of Texas at Austin)

"Statistical POS tagging experiments on Persian text", Fahimeh Raja
(University of Tehran), Samira Tasharofi (University of Tehran), and
Farhad Oroumchian (University of Wollongong in Dubai/University of
Tehran)

"Part-of-speech tagging for Persian", Sanaz Jabbari and Ben Allison
(University of Sheffield)

"Evaluation of part of speech tagging on Persian text", Fahimeh Raja ,
Hadi Amiri , Samira Tasharofi and Hossein Hojjat (University of Tehran)
and Farhad Oroumchian (University of Wollongong in Dubai/University of
Tehran)

----------------------------------
Demos and Posters
----------------------------------

"FieldWorks language explorer and Arabic script data", Beth Bryson (SIL
International)

"The Koran database", Mahmooud Elsayess (Read~Verse Company)

"Human vision inspired Optical Character Recognition", Mandana Hamidi
(Azad University of Qazvin), Ali Borji (Institute for Studies in
Theoretical Physics and Mathematics) and Fariborz Mahmoudi (Azad
University of Qazvin)

"Pashto-English machine translation using TranSphere", Craig Kopris
(AppTek Inc.)

"Speech-Translation of languages with scarce resources", Hassan Sawaf
and Craig Kopris (AppTek Inc.)

"Extensible integrated Treebank annotation environment", Otakar Smrž
(Charles University in Prague)

----------------------------------
Alternates
----------------------------------

"Algorithm for subject zero pronoun detection and restoration in Urdu
discourse", Abid Khan, Aamir Khan, and Naveed Ali (University of
Peshawar)

"A Persian morphological parser using POS tagging", Ali Azimizadeh
(Center of Speech Technology Research, SimAva Co), Mohamad Mehdi Arab
(Center of Speech Technology Research, SimAva Co), and Aarvin Farahmand
(Ryerson University)

------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
--
End of Arabic-L:  16 Jul 2007