[Corpora-List] 2nd CFP: Coling Workshop on Arabic Script Languages

Thu Mar 11 15:12:12 UTC 2004

 		  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. Submissions are limited to one
individual and one joint paper per author.

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
Miriam Butt, Konstanz University, Germany
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
Bonnie Glover Stalls, University of Southern California
Rémi Zajac, SYSTRAN Software