[Apologies for multiple postings]
CALL FOR PAPERS
ACL 2005 WORKSHOP ON
COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO SEMITIC LANGUAGES
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
June 29, 2005
**********Submission Deadline April 10 2005 ******************
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
====================
The Semitic family includes many languages and dialects spoken by a large
number of native speakers (around 300 Million). However, Semitic languages
are still understudied. The most prominent members of this family are Arabic
and its dialects, Hebrew, Amharic, Aramaic, Maltese and Syriac. Beyond their
shared ancestry which is apparent through pervasive cognate sharing, a
common characteristic of these languages is the rich and productive
pattern-based morphology and similar syntactic constructions.
An increasing body of computational linguistics work is starting to appear
for both Arabic and Hebrew. Arabic alone, as the largest member of the
Semitic family, has been receiving a lot of attention lately in terms of
dedicated workshops and conferences. These include, but are not limited to,
the workshop on Arabic Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2002), a
special session on Arabic processing in Traitement Automatique du Langage
Naturel (TALN 2004), the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Arabic
Script-based Languages (COLING 2004), and the NEMLAR Arabic Language
Resources and Tools Conference in Cairo, Egypt (2004). This phenomenon has
been coupled with a relative surge in resources for Arabic due to concerted
efforts by the LDC and ELDA/ELRA. However, there is an apparent lag in the
development of resources and tools for other Semitic languages. Often, work
on individual Semitic languages, unfortunately, still tends to be done with
limited awareness of ongoing research in other Semitic languages. Within the
last four years, only three workshops addressed Semitic languages: an ACL
2002 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages and an MT
Summit IX Workshop on Machine Translation for Semitic Languages in 2003, and
the EAMT 2004, held in Malta, had a special session on Semitic languages.
This workshop is a sequel to the ACL 2002 workshop and shares its goals of:
(i) heightening awareness amongst Semitic-language researchers of shared
breakthroughs and challenges,
(ii) highlighting issues common to all Semitic languages as much as
possible,
(iii) encouraging the potential for developing coordinated approaches; and
(iv) in addition, leveraging resource and tool creation for less prominent
members of the Semitic language family.
WORKSHOP TOPICS
===============
We invite submissions of papers addressing any of the following issues:
- Computational approaches to phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and
pragmatics of Semitic languages
- Applications for Semitic languages such as, but not limited to, machine
translation, summarization and information retrieval
- Tools for processing of Semitic languages (e.g. POS taggers, parsers,
etc.)
- Empirical studies of unique/specific phenomena in Semitic languages
- Creating computational resources for Semitic languages
- Comparative computational studies of Semitic languages
- Leveraging resources in other languages (Semitic or other) to create
resources and tools for Semitic languages
While we invite submissions addressing any of the above topics, or related
issues, we particularly welcome work involving Semitic languages with scarce
resources.
WORKSHOP FORMAT
===============
The workshop will last for one day, June 29th, and will consist of:
- An invited talk (by Salim Roukos, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center)
- Several sessions of regular paper presentations
- A panel discussion drawing on aspects of the participating papers and
their implications for future collaboration and coordination
SUBMISSION INFORMATION
======================
Submissions will consist of regular full papers of max. 8 pages, formatted
following the ACL 2005 guidelines
(http://www.aclweb.org/acl2005/index.php?stylefiles). All submissions must
be anonymous. Please send submissions in either .pdf or .ps form. Both
submission and review processes will be handled electronically. In a
separate email with subject SemCL05 please send names of Authors and name of
contact person. We are pursuing the possibility of publishing a selection of
accepted papers in a journal special issue on Semitic computational
linguistics.
IMPORTANT DATES
===============
Regular paper submissions April 10
Notification (short and regular papers) May 4
Camera-ready papers May 15
ORGANIZERS
==========
Kareem Darwish (German University in Cairo, Egypt) kareem@darwish.org
Mona Diab (Columbia University, USA) mdiab@cs.columbia.edu
Nizar Habash (Columbia University, USA) habash@cs.columbia.edu
CONTACT
=======
For submissions, questions, comments, etc. please send email to
semwksp-acl05@ccls.columbia.edu
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
=================
Ibrahim A. Alkharashi (King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Saudi
Arabia)
Tim Buckwalter (Linguistic Data Consortium, USA)
Violetta Cavalli-Sforza (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Yaacov Choueka (Bar-Ilan University, Israel)
Joseph Dichy (Lyon University, France)
Martha Evens (Illinois Institute of Technology, USA)
Ali Farghaly (SYSTRAN Software, Inc.)
Alexander Fraser (USC/ISI)
Andrew Freeman (Mitre)
Alon Itai, (Technion, Israel)
George Kiraz (Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, USA)
Katrin Kirchhoff (University of Washington, USA)
Alon Lavie (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Mohamed Maamouri (Linguistic Data Consortium, USA)
Uzzi Ornan (Technion, Israel)
Anne De Roeck (Open University, UK)
Michael Rosner (University of Malta, Malta)
Salim Roukos (IBM, USA)
Khalil Sima'an (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Abdelhadi Soudi (ENIM, Rabat, Morocco)
Shuly Wintner (University of Haifa, Israel)
Remi Zajac (SYSTRAN Software, USA)
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