[Corpora-List] Final CFP: Coling Workshop on Arabic Script Languages [Extended D eadline]

From: Karine Megerdoomian (karinem@inxight.com)
Date: Thu Mar 25 2004 - 22:10:00 MET

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                      FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

                    COLING 2004 WORKSHOP ON
    COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO ARABIC SCRIPT-BASED LANGUAGES

                     Geneva, Switzerland, 23-27 August 2004
                 Submission Deadline: 1 April 2004 [EXTENDED]
                  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@aol.com and karinem@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 can be found at
    http://www.issco.unige.ch/coling2004/coling2004downloads.html.

    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: April 1st, 2004 [EXTENDED]
    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, Mohammad V University, 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



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