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 Arabic BLARK and 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. Survey on Middle Eastern Localization Market for 2005 5. How to contribute to the NEMLAR network 6. Would you like to join the NEMLAR network? 7. Special Interest Group (SIG) on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages 8. New language resources, books, papers, software and journals 9. Upcoming Events 10. 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. 2. Updated version of the Arabic BLARK and the Report on Survey on Arabic Language Resources and Tools in Mediterranean Countries ********************************************************************************************************** The report on Basic Language Resource Kit (BLARK) and the report on Survey on Arabic Language Resources and Tools in Mediterranean Countries have been slightly updated. The new updated versions of the reports 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 the Arabic Language Resources and Tools' conference, 22-23 September 2004, Cairo, Egypt. For more information please see http://nemlar.org 4.Survey on Middle Eastern Localization Market for 2005 ******************************************************* The organisation LISA is collecting information for a survey on Middle Eastern Localization Market for 2005. If you wish to contribute please visit http://www.lisa.org/interact/2004/survey/auto/arabicSurvey.html. The collecting of information ends December 24 2004. 5. 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 6. 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. 7.Special Interest Group (SIG) on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages ******************************************************************************* A Special Interest Group (SIG) on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages, under the auspices of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is being proposed. The main purpose of the SIG would be to supervise the organization of a yearly or biennial meeting dedicated to this area. It will provide a forum in which researchers and practitioners could exchange ideas, discuss problems and share resources and tools. The NEMLAR network is going to take contact to the SIG for collaboration. Further information on the SIG may be found at http://www.semitic.tk 8. New language resources, books, papers, software and journals *************************************************************** Books: • Clive Holes: Modern Arabic - Structures, Functions, and Varieties, Revised Edition. For more information see http://www.nemlar.org/DVDs.txt • Al-Kitaab fii Ta callum al-cArabiyya with DVD. A Textbook for Beginning Arabic: Part One, Second Edition. For more information see http://www.nemlar.org/Al-Kitaab.txt • Alif Baa with DVDs. The DVDs contain both audio and video exercises, which give an introduction to Arabic letters and sounds. http://www.nemlar.org/Alif_baa.txt • Italian-Arabic dictionary. For more information see http://www.nemlar.org/Italian_Arabic_dic.txt Journal: • Issue 13 of the International Journal "LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS" on African, Semitic and applied linguistics. For more information see http://www.nemlar.org/Language_linguistics.txt Resources: • Arabic Dependency Treebank. For more information see http://wave.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2004T23 Articles: • Ahmad Raghib: Thesis in Arabic on "Arabic Phonology in the light of Modern Acoustics". For more information see http://www.nemlar.org/Scientific-papers Software: • The Systran MT system has the language pair English into/from Arabic. For more information see http://www.digitalriver.com/dr/v2/ec_MAIN.Entry10?V1=641910&PN=2&SP=10023&xid=28102 • Reverso Intranet for Arabic. For more information see http://www.visionclient.com/Softissimo/so26.php?i=1276 • Multilingual NLP: Tagger, segmentation, probabilistic syntactic parsing,and semantic role parsing for Arabic. For more information see http://nlp.stanford.edu/research.shtml Visit the NEMLAR web site for more information: http://www.nemlar.org 9. Upcoming Events ******************** • Theory and Implementation of a Large-Scale Arabic Phonetic Transcriptor, and Applications, The Faculty of Engineering, Cairo Univ., Library of the Dept. of Electronics and Communications on Dec. 25th, 2004, 11:00 am. Further details may be obtained by contacting Mr. M. Attiya, email: m_atteya2004@yahoo.com • Computer Science Education and Practice in Arabic (CSEPA ’05), Cairo, Egypt, January 2-3, 2005. Further details may be obtained by contacting Dr. Salwa Hamada, email: hesalwa@hotmail.com • 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 Visit the NEMLAR web site for more information http://www.nemlar.org/Events 10. 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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