Call for Papers: HLT & NLP within the Arabic world Workshop at LREC 2008

[ELDA]

[Apologies for multiple postings]

*
HLT & NLP within the Arabic world: Arabic Language and **local ** 
languages processing: Status Updates and Prospects *

Please refer to http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/Workshops.html for 
details.

* Motivation and Aims*

This Workshop intends to add value to the issues addressed during the 
main conference (Human Language Technologies (HLT) & Natural Language 
Processing (NLP)) and enhance the work carried out at different places 
to process Arabic language(s) and more generally Semitic languages and 
other local and foreign languages spoken in the region.

It should bring together people who are actively involved in Arabic 
Written and Spoken language processing in a mono- or cross/multilingual 
context, and give them an opportunity to update the community through 
reports on completed and ongoing work as well as on the availability of 
LRs, evaluation protocols and campaigns, products and core technologies 
(in particular open source ones). This should enable the participants to 
develop a common view on where we stand with respect to these particular 
set of languages and to foster the discussion of the future of this 
research area. Particular attention will be paid to activities involving 
technologies such as Machine Translation, Cross-Lingual Information 
Retrieval/extraction, Summarization, Speech to text transcriptions, 
etc., and languages such as Arabic varieties, Amazigh, Amharic, Hebrew, 
Maltese, and other local languages. Evaluation methodologies and 
resources for evaluation of HLT are also a main focus.

* Topics of Interest *

The submissions should address some of the following issues:

· Issues in the design, the acquisition, creation, management, access, 
distribution, use of Language Resources (Standard Arabic, Colloquial 
Arabic, other Semitic languages, Amazigh, Coptic, Maltese, 
English/French spoken locally, etc.)

· Impact on LR collections/processing and NLP of the crucial issues 
related to "code switching" between different dialects and languages

· Specific issues related to the above-mentioned languages such as role 
of morphology, named entities, corpus alignment, etc.)

· Multilinguality issues including relationship between Colloquial and 
Standard Arabic

· Exploitation of LR in different types of applications

· Industrial LR requirements and community's response;

· Benchmarking of systems and products; resources for benchmarking and 
evaluation for written and spoken language processing;

· Focus on some key technologies such as MT (all approaches e.g. 
Statistical, Example-Based, etc.), Information Retrieval, Speech 
Recognition, Spoken Documents Retrieval, CLIR, Question-Answering, 
Summarization,

· Local, regional, and international activities and projects;

· Needs, possibilities, forms, initiatives of/for regional and 
international cooperation.

* Submission Details (more on 
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/Workshops.html) *


Submissions must be in English. Abstracts for workshop contributions 
should not exceed Four A4 pages (excluding references). An additional 
title page should state: the title; author(s); affiliation(s); and 
contact author's e-mail address, as well as postal address, telephone 
and fax numbers.

Submission is to be sent by email, preferably in Postscript or PDF 
format, to: arabic at elda.org <mailto:choukri at elda.org> to arrive before * 
15 February 2008 * .

Registration to LREC’08 will be required for participation, so potential 
participants are invited to refer to the main conference website for all 
details not covered in the present call ( 
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/)


* Important Dates *

Call for papers: 3 January 2008

Deadline for abstract submissions: 15 February 2008

Notification of acceptance: 14 March 2008

Final version of accepted paper: 11 April 2008

Workshop full-day: Saturday 31^st May 2008

* Workshop chair *

Khalid Choukri (ELRA/ELDA, France )

* Workshop Co-chairs *

Mona Diab, Columbia University , USA

Bente Maegaard (CST, University of Copenhagen , Denmark )

Paolo Rosso, Universidad Politécnica Valencia , Spain

Abdelhadi Soudi ENIM ( Morocco )

Ali Farghaly, Oracle USA and Monterey Institute of International Studies,