Second Call for papers (CAASL-2)

[Ali Farghaly]

SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

 



CAASL-2

Second Workshop on

Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages

 

July 21-22, 2007

The Linguistic Summer Institute
Stanford University

 Workshop description


 

The first workshop on “Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages”, held in conjunction with COLING 2004, brought 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 proposed second workshop, three 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. 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 in 2004.

 

The invited speaker for this workshop will be Richard Sproat from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

 

The call for papers as well as future information on the workshop can be found at http://www.zoorna.org/CAASL2 (http://www.zoorna.org/CAASL2)

 Workshop Topics


 

Authors of papers in any area of NLP in Arabic script-based languages are invited to apply. We also accept proposals for demonstrations of computational systems. Preference would be given to papers that extend their results and analyses to other Arabic script-based languages. Papers and demos could be on - but not limited to - any of the following topics:     · Knowledge bases, corpora, and development of resources
    · Transliteration, transcription and diacritization
    · Morphological analysis
    · Syntactic ambiguity resolution
    · Shallow and deep parsing
    · Machine translation from and to Arabic script languages
    · Sense disambiguation
    · Homograph resolution
    · Semantic analysis
    · Semantic web and inferences
    · Named entity recognition
    · Information retrieval
    · Text mining
    · Summarization
    · Text-to-speech systems



 

 

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 Ali.Farghaly at oracle.com (mailto:Ali.Farghaly at oracle.com) and karinem at mitre.org (mailto: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.  Important dates


 

Submissions due:                                                             February 26, 2007

Notification of acceptance:                                            April 16, 2007

Camera ready submissions:                                            June 15, 2007

 Organizing committee


 

Ali Farghaly, Oracle USA, Ali.Farghaly at oracle.com (mailto:Ali.Farghaly at oracle.com)

Karine Megerdoomian, MITRE Corporation, karine at mitre.org (mailto:karine at mitre.org)

 

 Program Committee


 

Jan W. Amtrup                                     Kofax Images

Tim Buckwalter                                     Linguistic Data  Consortium

Miriam Butt                                           Konstanz University, Germany

Violetta Cavalli-Sforza                         Carnegie Mellon University

Joseph Dichy                                        Lyon University

Nizar Habash                                        Columbia University

Mona Diab                                            Columbia University

Kevin Knight                                        USC/Information Sciences Institute

Farhad Oroumchian                             University of Wollongong in Dubai

Ahmed Rafea                                        The American University in Cairo

Bonnie Glover Stalls                            University of Southern California

Rémi Zajac                                             Yahoo!, Inc.

Kareem Darweesh                                Cairo University

Sherri L. Condon                                The MITRE Corporation

Mohammad Haji-Abdolhosseini  Iowa State University

Farhad Oroumchian                       University of Wollongong in Dubai

Imed Zitouni                                      IBM

Hany Hassan                                     IBM Cairo