Welcome to the NEMLAR newsletter. We bring you the latest news on language resources and language technologies for Arabic in Europe and the Southern Mediterranean countries and keep you informed about upcoming events, and other useful information. A version of this newsletter is also available from: http://www.nemlar.org/Newsletter To subscribe, please send an email to: nemlar@cst.dk If you find this newsletter useful and informative, feel free to forward it to others. The newsletter will appear approximately four times per year. Please send any feedback you may have to: nemlar@cst.dk NEMLAR was a European Commission supported initiative from 2003 to 2005. NEMLAR was dedicated to surveying the state of the art of language resources for the Arabic language and the needs for such resources, to providing a BLARK specification for Arabic and to promote the development of Arabic language resources - in Europe and the Southern Mediterranean countries. Some of the work from the project will be continued: project web site, newsletter and updates of survey results and the BLARK. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Newsletter Content ------------------ 1. The NEMLAR Arabic Language Resources 2. NEMLAR at the LREC conference 3. NEMLAR publications 4. New language resources, books, papers, software and journals 5. Upcoming Events 6. Links 1. The NEMLAR Arabic Language Resources *************************************** The following resources produced within the NEMLAR project may be purchased from ELRA, http://www.elra.info • The NEMLAR Arabic Written Corpus • The NEMLAR Arabic Broadcast News Speech Corpus • The NEMLAR Arabic Speech synthesis Corpus 2.NEMLAR at the LREC conference ******************************* The NEMLAR project was presented at the LREC conference in Italy in May 2006. Two papers were presented: • Building Annotated Written and Spoken Arabic LRs in the NEMLAR project - paper presented at LREC May 2006 For more information see http://www.nemlar.org/Publications/131_pdf.pdf • The BLARK concept and BLARK for Arabic - paper presented at LREC May 2006 For more information see http://www.nemlar.org/Publications/521_pdf.pdf 3. NEMLAR Publications ********************** In connection with the production of the three NEMLAR ressources (Arabic Written Corpus, Arabic Broadcast News Speech Corpus, and Arabic Broadcast News Speech Corpus) the following documents have been written: • Specifications of the Arabic Written Corpus http://www.nemlar.org/Publications/WC_design_final.pdf • Specifications of the Arabic Broadcast news speech corpus http://www.nemlar.org/Publications/BNSC_v1.3.pdf • Specifications of the Arabic TTS Speech corpus http://www.nemlar.org/Publications/TTS_v1.4.pdf • Specification of validation criteria: Validation criteria for Nemlar Arabic TTS Database http://www.nemlar.org/Publications/TTS_valid.pdf • Specification of validation criteria: Validation criteria for Nemlar Arabic Broadcast News Speech Corpus. http://www.nemlar.org/Publications/BNSC_valid.pdf • Specification of validation criteria: Validation criteria for Nemlar Arabic Written Corpus. http://www.nemlar.org/Publications/WC_validation_criteria.pdf 4. New language resources, books, papers, software and journals *************************************************************** Books: • A Linguistic History of Arabic by Jonathan Owens. For more information see http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199290826 • A Reference Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic by Karin C. Ryding. For more information see http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521777712 • Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, Editor: Sami Boudelaa, University of Cambridge. For more information see http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=CILT%20266 Software: • Arabic Lesson Builder. For more information see http://www.readverse.com/Arabic_Abacus.html New institute: • Higher Institute for Studies and Consultation in Copenhagen. For more information see http://www.hiscc.dk Article: • Arabic Imperfect Verbs in Translation. For more information see http://www.nemlar.org/Arabic-L_LING_New_Article.txt Visit the NEMLAR web site for more information: http://www.nemlar.org 5. Upcoming Events ******************** • EAMT 11th Annual Conference, 19-20 June 2006, Oslo, Norway For more information see http://eamt.emmtee.net/ • TC-STAR Workshop on Speech-to-Speech Translation, June 19-21 2006 Barcelona, Spain.For more information see http://www.elda.org/tcstar-workshop/ • Coling/ACL2006, 17th - 21st July 2006, Sydney, Australia http://www.acl2006.mq.edu.au • ESSLLI 2006 - 18th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, 31 July - 11 August, 2006, Malaga, Spain. For more information see http://esslli2006.lcc.uma.es/give-page.php • AMTA 2006, August 8-12, 2006, Boston Marriott, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA For more information see http://amta2006.amtaweb.org • FinTAL, 5th International Conference on Natural Language Processing 23-25 August 2006, Turku, Finland. For more information see http://www.it.utu.fi/fintal • Translating and the Computer 28: Conference, 16-17 November 2006, London. For more information see http://www.aslib.com/conferences • Arabic NLP/MT Conference, October 23 2006, London. For more information see http://www.bcs-mt.org.uk/ • OnToContent 2006 -Workshop on Ontology Content and Evaluation in Enterprise - With two tracks on eHealth and Human Resources-In conjunction of the International Federated Conferences (OTM '06),3-4 Nov 2006, Montpellier, France For more information http://www.starlab.vub.ac.be/staff/mustafa/OnToContent06 • International Conference on Computer Engineering & Systems (ICCES'06). 5-7 November 2006, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt. For more information http://www.iceec.org • CI 2006 Special Session on Natural Language Processing for Real Life Applications, November 20-22, 2006, San Francisco, California, USA For more information http://w5.cs.uni-sb.de/~cmueller/ci06 • APA 2006: Treebanking and Advanced Processing of Arabic, November 30, 2006 Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic For more information see http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/padt/TAPA2006 • Sixth Conference on Language Engineering, 6 - 7 December 2006 For more information see http://www.asueng.eun.eg/else • IEEE First International conference on digital information management, December 6 - 8 2006, Christ College, Bangalore, India. For more information see http://www.icdim.org • Beyond the Orient: The Research Challenges Ahead”21st International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages (ICCPOL2006),December 17-19, 2006, Singapore. For more information see http://www.iccpol-06.org • New approaches to machine translation - a METIS-II workshop, January 11th 2007 Leuven, Belgium For more information see http://ccl.kuleuven.be/ws-metis Visit the NEMLAR web site for more information http://www.nemlar.org/Events 6. Links ******** • ELRA distributes Arabic language resources: http://www.elra.info • Linguistic Data Consortium distributes Arabic language resources - LDC: http://www.ldc.upenn.edu • Link to Arabic NLP technologies at RDI (to be found under the submenu item 'Arabic NLP' under the main menu item 'Technologies'): http://www.RDI-eg.com • The Faharis Site, list of Arabic web resources: http://www.faharis.net • Latifa Al-Sulaiti's homepage with collections of tools and resources for Arabic: http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/latifa/survey.htm • Link to free morphological analyzers for the Arabic language: http://www.glue.umd.edu/~kareem/research/ • Visit the Linguist List related to Arabic language: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/arabic-l.html • List of pointers to Arabic and other Semitic NLP and Speech sites: http://www.elsnet.org/arabiclist.html • Websites dealing with Arabic human language technologies: http://www.technolangue.net/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=11 • Links to Arabic processing tools at the University of Leeds: http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/latifa/survey.htm • Links to Arabic tools, resources, conferences, etc: http://www.mghamdi.com/links.htm • Link to Free Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon: http://www.qaiu.org/archives/quran/arabic_lexicon_projects/index.html • Link to Arabic Language Home http://www.arabic-language.org • The Open Language Archives http://www.language-archives.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This newsletter is published by the NEMLAR project (http://www.nemlar.org) and produced by Center for Sprogteknologi. To contact the project co-ordinator: Center for Sprogteknologi (CST), University of Copenhagen Project Co-ordinator: Bente Maegaard Tel: +45 35 32 90 74, Fax: +45 35 32 90 89 email: nemlar@cst.dk