HLT & NLP within the Arabic world:

Arabic Language and local languages processing:

Status Updates and Prospects

Saturday 31^st May 2008

09:00 – 17:50

Draft programme

09:00 - 09:20	Introduction: State-of-the-art, major issues and current initiatives for Arabic and Local languages Khalid Choukri
09:20 - 10:00 Chair: Mona Diab	Invited speech: Arabic WordNet Horacio Rodriguez, Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics. Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
10:05 - 11:45 Chair: Paolo Rosso	Oral Session: Applications and Technologies for Written language Information retrieval in Arabic language Malek Boualem, Ramzi Abbes Methods for porting NL-based restricted e-commerce systems into other languages Najeh Hajlaoui, Daoud Maher Daoud, Christian Boitet Arabic-English translation improvement by target-side neural network language modeling Maxim Khalilov, José A. R. Fonollosa, F. Zamora-Martínez, María J. Castro-Bleda, S. España-Boquera Building an Arabic Morphological Analyzer as part of an Open Arabic NLP Platform Lahsen Abouenour, Said El Hassani, Tawfiq Yazidy, Karim Bouzouba, Abdelfattah Hamdani Arabic Named Entity Recognition using Conditional Random Fields Yassine Benajiba and Paolo Rosso
11:45 - 12:00	Coffee Break
12:00 - 13:30	Poster Session Automatic versus interactive analysis for the massive vowelization, tagging and lemmatization of Arabic Fathi Debili, Zied Ben Tahar Can the building of corpus-based Arabic concordances with AraConc and DIINAR.1 tackle the issue of Arabic polyglossia? Joseph Dichy and Ramzi Abbès Morpho-syntactic tagging system for Arabic texts A. Yousfi , A. El jihad, and L. Aouragh Memory-Based Vocalization of Arabic Sandra Kübler, Emad Mohamed Towards a syntactic lexicon of Arabic Verbs Noureddine Loukil, Kais Haddar, Abdelmajid Ben Hamadou Automatic Morphological Rule Induction for Arabic Ahmad Hany Hossny, Khaled Shaalan, Aly Fahmy Amazigh Data Base El Mehdi Iazzi, Mohamed Outahajala
13:30- 14:30	Lunch
14:30 - 15:30 Chair :Bente Maegaard	Oral Session: Applications and Technologies for Spoken language Towards a human-machine spoken dialogue in Arabic Younes Bahou, Lamia Hadrich Belguith, and Abdelmajid Ben Hamadou Broadcast News Transcription Baseline System using the NEMLAR database R. Bayeh, C. Mokbel, G. Chollet Automatic Pronunciation Dictionary Toolkit for Arabic Hussein Hiyassat, Mustafa Yaseen, Nihad Arabiat
15:30 - 16:30: Chair: Abdelhadi Soudi	Oral Session: Arabic and varieties Guidelines for Annotation of Arabic Dialectness Nizar Habash, Owen Rambow, Mona Diab and Reem Kanjawi-Faraj Language modeling for local and Modern Standard Arabic Ilana Heintz, Chris Brew Prague Arabic Dependency Treebank: A Word on the Million Words Otakar Smrz, Viktor Bielicky, Iveta Kourilova, Jakub Kracmar, Jan Hajic, Petr Zemanek
16:30- 16:50	Coffee break
16:50 - 17:50 Moderator: Khalid Choukri	Panel discussion: Arabic(s) and Language processing : basics & trends