> ===============================================================
> COLING 2004 WORKSHOP
> Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages
>
> Saturday, August 28, 2004
> University of Geneva
> Geneva, Switzerland
> ===============================================================
>
> CONFERENCE WEBSITE: http://www.issco.unige.ch/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
> 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 could be on - but not limited to -
> any of the following topics:
>
> * Morphological analysis
> * Syntactic ambiguity resolution
> * Relevance of shallow parsing
> * Machine translation from and to Arabic script languages
> * Sense disambiguation
> * Homograph resolution
> * Semantic analysis
> * Entity recognition
> * Information retrieval
> * Classification of documents
> * Text mining
> * Summarization
> * Statistical approaches
> * Speech recognition and generation
> * Lexical databases
> * Knowledge and domain representation
> * Spelling and grammar checking tools
>
> 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 AliFarghaly@aol.com and karinem@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.
>
> Hardcopy submissions should be sent to:
> Ali Farghaly
> SYSTRAN Software, Inc.
> 9333 Genesee Ave, Pl 1
> San Diego, CA 92121
> USA
>
> 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
> Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, Carnegie Mellon University
> Joseph Dichy, Lyon University
> 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
> Rémi Zajac, SYSTRAN Software
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