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 abreast of the results achieved in the project, 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 every quarter. Please send any feedback you may have to: nemlar@cst.dk NEMLAR is a European Commission supported initiative 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. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Newsletter Content ------------------ 1. Development of Arabic Language Resources within the NEMLAR project 2. Updated version of the Report on Survey on Arabic Language Resources and Tools in Mediterranean Countries 3. Proceedings from 'Arabic Language Resources and Tools' conference, 22-23 September 2004, Cairo, Egypt 4. How to contribute to the NEMLAR network 5. Would you like to join the NEMLAR network? 6. New language resources, books, papers, software and journals 7. Upcoming Events 8. Links 1. Development of Arabic Language Resources within the NEMLAR project ********************************************************************* Within its action to fulfill some requirements as defined by the consortium in the framework of the Basic Language Resource Kit (BLARK) for Arabic, the NEMLAR consortium has decided during its latest meeting to carry the following activities: a) Produce an annotated & unannotated written corpus of Modern Standard Arabic, fully vowelized (approx. 500K words) b) Produce an audio/speech database for Speech synthesis with a male and female voice with a well designed textual corpus of Modern Standard Arabic; c) Produce an Arabic database of broadcast news; fully annotated at various levels (orthographically, named entities , ...) The production work will be carried out jointly by three partners : RDI (Egypt), Amman University (Jordan), and ENSIAS (Morocco); Validation will be carried out by CST (Denmark) and ELDA (France) using some of the validation work designed within the Validation Committee of ELRA. Resources will be packaged and made widely available via ELRA. For the moment specifications are being made for the 3 types of resources. 2. Updated version of the Report on Survey on Arabic Language Resources and Tools in Mediterranean Countries ******************************************************************************** The report on Survey on Arabic Language Resources and Tools in Mediterranean Countries has been slightly updated. The new updated version of the report may be found at http://www.nemlar.org/ 3. Proceedings from 'Arabic Language Resources and Tools' conference, 22-23 September 2004, Cairo, Egypt **************************************************************************** Printed proceedings and proceedings on CDs may be purchased from CST from the Arabic Language Resources and Tools'conference, 22-23 September 2004, Cairo, Egypt. For more information please see http://nemlar.org/proceedings.html 4. How to contribute to the NEMLAR network ****************************************** If you wish to contribute to the work of the NEMLAR project you may fill in the survey questionnaire about your language resources and/or the industrial needs for language resources. Visit the NEMLAR web site in order to answer the survey questionnaire: http://www.nemlar.org/Survey-questionnaires 5. Would you like to join the NEMLAR network? ********************************************* NEMLAR wants to extend the network to all interested parties, i.e. everyone who wants to contribute to the NEMLAR goals and everyone who is interested in following the development in Arabic language resources. We hope that the extended NEMLAR network we will soon become a strong community in the field of Arabic language resources. You join the network by sending an email to nemlar@cst.dk, giving your name, affiliation with address, phone and fax, and your URL. Your name, affiliation, and URL will be published on the NEMLAR web site, but we will not give your address, your phone or your email for privacy reasons. All members of the network will receive the NEMLAR newsletter and any other relevant information. 6. New language resources, books, papers, software and journals *************************************************************** Books: • Hussein Abdul-Raof: Consonance in the Qur'an - A Conceptual, Intertextual and Linguistic Analysis. For more information see http://www.nemlar.org/New-Book.txt • Eckehard Schulz: A Student Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic. For more information see http://cf.linguistlist.org/cfdocs/new-website/LL-WorkingDirs/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=13335 • Karl Stowasser, Moukhtar Ani, Foreword by Elizabeth M. Bergman (eds):A Dictionary of Syrian Arabic - English-Arabic. For more information see http://press.georgetown.edu/detail.html?id=1589011058" Resources: • Arabic concordancy program from the Nijmegen Arabic/Dutch Dictionary Project. For more information see http://www.let.ru.nl/wba/Content2/1.4.6_Concordancing.htm Software: • Arabic virtual keyboard: With Muftah-Alhuruf.com you can send Arabic e-mails and search the Internet for Arabic words, without having an Arabic keyboard or an Arabic operating system. For more information see http://www.muftah-alhuruf.com/email.html Visit the NEMLAR web site for more information: http://www.nemlar.org 7. Upcoming Events ******************** • 19th Arabic Linguistic Symposium, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, April 1-3 2005. For more information see http://www.cst.dk/nemlar/Events/ALS_at_UIUC.pdf • EAMT 2005, Budapest, Hungary, 30-31 May 2005. For more information see http://www.eamt.org/eamt2005 • TALN, DOURDAN, 6-10 June 2005. For more information see http://taln.limsi.fr • The Fifth Conference on Language Engineering, September 14-15, 2005, Cairo, Egypt. For more information see http://ntserver.asueng.eun.eg/esle • SPECOM 2005, 10th International Conference on Speech and Computer, October 17-19 2005 University of Patras, Patras, Greece. For more information see http://www.wcl.ee.upatras.gr/specom2005.htm • LULCL 2005 - Lesser Used Languages and Computer Linguistics, 27-28 October 2005, Eurac research, Bolzano. For more information see http://www.eurac.edu/Org/LanguageLaw/Multilingualism/Projects/Conference2005.htm Visit the NEMLAR web site for more information http://www.nemlar.org/Events 8. 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 • 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 • Lists of websites with theses dealing with Arabic human language technologies http://www.biomath.jussieu.fr/ATALA/these/#Idx3 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To subscribe or unsubscribe, please send an email to: nemlar@cst.dk 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