Appel: HLT & NLP within the Arabic world Workshop at LREC 2008

[Thierry Hamon]

Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:01:19 +0100
From: ELDA <info at elda.org>
Message-ID: <47864F5F.90304 at elda.org>
X-url: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/Workshops.html
X-url: http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/


[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 LREC2008 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,


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Message diffuse par la liste Langage Naturel <LN at cines.fr>
Informations, abonnement : http://www.atala.org/article.php3?id_article=48
English version       : 
Archives                 : http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/ln.html
                                http://liste.cines.fr/info/ln

La liste LN est parrainee par l'ATALA (Association pour le Traitement
Automatique des Langues)
Information et adhesion  : http://www.atala.org/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------