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 - in Europe and the Southern Mediterranean countries. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Newsletter Content ------------------ 1. Arabic Resources and Tools conference 2. New language resources, books, papers, software and journals 3. Upcoming Events 4. How to contribute to the NEMLAR network 5. Links 1. Arabic Resources and Tools conference ***************************************** The first international conference on Arabic Language Resources and Tools, is organised by the NEMLAR consortium on 22-23 September 2004,Cairo, Egypt. NEMLAR is supported by the European Commission. Sakhr, Egypt and ELRA (European Language Resources Association) France are sponsors of the conference. Conference aims Language Resources (LRs) are recognised as a central component of the linguistic infrastructure, necessary for the development of HLT applications and products, and therefore for industrial development. In this conference we will focus on Arabic language technology and on the necessary language resources and tools for both research and commercial development of language technology for Arabic. Multilingual language technology is also in the focus, as well as general methodologies. Evaluation of modules and systems is another field which is closely related to language resources, because language resources are used to perform the evaluation. Consequently we also invite papers in this area. Substantial mutual benefits are achieved by addressing these issues through international collaboration. For this reason, the conference is organised at the international level. The term “language resources” (LRs) refers to sets of language data and descriptions in machine readable form, used in many types of areas/components/systems/applications: - Creation and evaluation of natural language, speech and multimodal algorithms and systems; - Software localisation and language services; - Language enabled information and communication services; - Knowledge management; - E-commerce, e-publishing, e-learning, e-government; - Cultural heritage; - Linguistic studies; - Etc. This large range of uses makes the LRs infrastructure a strategic part of the e-society, where the creation of a basic set of LRs for all languages must be ensured in order to bring all languages to the same level of usability and availability. Examples of LRs are written or spoken corpora and lexica, which may be annotated or not, multimodal resources, grammars, terminology or domain specific databases and dictionaries, ontologies, multimedia databases, etc. LRs also cover basic software tools for the acquisition, preparation, collection, management, customisation and use of the above mentioned examples. The relevance of evaluation for language technologies development is increasingly recognised. This involves assessing the state-of-the-art for a given technology, measuring the progress achieved, comparing different approaches to a given problem, assessing the availability of technologies for a given application, benchmarking, and assessing system usability and user satisfaction. The aim of this conference is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art for Arabic resources and tools, discuss problems and opportunities, exchange information regarding LRs, their applications, ongoing and planned activities, industrial uses and needs, requirements coming from the new e-society, both with respect to policy issues and to technological and organisational ones. The first Call for papers is now issued and further information is available at the conference web site http://www.nemlar.org ********************************************************************* 2. New language resources, books, papers, software and journals *************************************************************** Papers: • Paper on Arabic morphemes. For more information see http://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S0010027703002051 • Paper "On Stochastic Models, Statistical Disambiguation, and Applications on Arabic NLP Problems. For more information see http://www.nemlar.org/Scientific-papers/Paper_StochasticModelsonArabicNLP.pdf • Thesis of M. Atiyya: Large-Scale Computational Processor of the Arabic Morphology, and Applications. For more information see http://www.nemlar.org/Publications/M_A_Thesis2000.pdf Software: • "TeLL me More" - Speech recognition for Arabic - a new Arabic Learning Software. For more information see http://www.nemlar.org/Tell-me-more.txt • NSC extends Speech Recognition to Arabic. For more information see http://www.nsc.co.il/news/nsc-arabic.html Visit the NEMLAR web site for more information: http://www.nemlar.org ********************************************************************* 3. Upcoming Events ****************** • TALN ´04 Traitement Automatique du Langage Naturel, Fes, Morocco, 19- 22 April 2004, Call for papers and for more information http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/jep-taln04/ • EAMT 2004, 20-22 April 2004, Malta, workshop on machine-translation-related issues concerning Semitic languages. For more information see http://www.eamt.org/eamt04/ • The first joint international conference on Arabic. Call for papers to language and linguistics, Oxford, July 30- 31 2004. Call for papers to and for more information http://www.nemlar.org/Events/oxford.txt • Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages, Coling 2004, 28 August 2004, Switzerland. For more information see http://members.cox.net/karinem/COLING2004 • Arabic Resources and Tools conference, September 22-23 2004, Cairo, Egypt. For more informaton see http://www.nemlar.org ********************************************************************* 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 industry needs for language resources. Visit the NEMLAR web site in order to answer the survey questionnaire: http://www.nemlar.org/Survey-questionnaires ********************************************************************* 5. Links ******** • 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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) Project Co-ordinator: Bente Maegaard Tel: +45 35 32 90 74, Fax: +45 35 32 90 89 email: nemlar@cst.dk