SL 2010 Workshop

Contact

HM — 2010-05-05T16:50:37Z

Workshop general chair:

Khalid Choukri, Choukri elda.org , ELRA/ELDA, Paris, France

Workshop co-chairs:

Owen Rambow, Columbia University, New York, USA

Bente Maegaard , University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Ibrahim A. Al-Kharashi, Computer and Electronics Research Institute, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia

Programme Committee

HM — 2010-05-05T16:48:29Z

Abdelhak Mouradi

Alexis Nasr

Atelach Alemu Argaw

Bente Maegaard

Chafic Mokbel

Christopher Cieri

Everhard Ditters

Hassan Sawaf

Horacio Rodríguez

Ibrahim Alkharashi

Imed Zitouni

Johannes Heinecke

Joseph Dichy

Khalid Choukri

Malek Boualem

Mike Rosner

Mohamed Maamouri

Mohsen Rashwan

Mona Diab

Motasem Alrahabi

Mustafa Yassen

Najeh Hajlaoui

Nasredine Semmar

Ossama Emam

Otakar Smrz

Owen Rambow

Paolo Rosso

Ramzi Abbes

Shuly Wintner

Tim Buckwalter

Programme

HM — 2010-05-05T12:49:36Z

9:15-9:30 Welcome and Introduction
Khalid Choukri, Owen Rambow, Bente Maegaard, and Ibrahim A. Al-Kharashi

Oral Session 1: Syntax, Semantics, and Parsing

9:30-9:50 Structures and Procedures in Arabic Language
André Jaccarini (1), Christian Gaubert (2), Claude Audebert (1),
(1)Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l'homme (MMSH), France
(2)Institut français d'archéologie orientale du Caire (IFAO), Cairo, Egypt

9:50-10:10 Developing and Evaluating an Arabic Statistical Parser
Ibrahim Zaghloul (1) and Ahmed Rafea (2)
(1) Central Lab for Agricultural Expert Systems, Agricultural Research Center, Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation.
(2) Computer Science and Engineering Dept., American University in Cairo

10:10-10:30 A Dependency Grammar for Amharic
Michael Gasser
Indiana University, USA

10:30-11:00 Coffee break

11:00-12:20 Poster Session 1: Morphology & NLP Applications I
A syllable-based approach to Semitic verbal morphology
Lynne Cahill,
University of Brighton, United Kingdom

Using the Yago ontology as a resource for the enrichment of Named Entities in Arabic WordNet
Lahsen Abouenour (1), Karim Bouzoubaa (1) and Paolo Rosso (2)
(1) Mohammadia School of Engineers, Med V University Rabat, Morocco
(2)Natural Language Engineering Lab. - ELiRF, Universidad Politécnica Valencia, Spain

Light Morphology Processing for Amazighe Language
Fadoua Ataa Allah and Siham Boulaknadel
CEISIC, IRCAM, Madinat Al Irfane, Rabat, Morocco

Using Mechanical Turk to Create a Corpus of Arabic Summaries
Mahmoud EL-Haj, Udo Kruschwitz and Chris Fox
School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, United Kingdom

DefArabicQA: Arabic Definition Question Answering System
Omar Trigui (1), Lamia Hadrich Belguith (1) and Paolo Rosso (2)
(1) ANLP Research Group- MIRACL Laboratory, University of Sfax, Tunisia
(2) Natural Language Engineering Lab. – EliRF, Universidad Politécnica Valencia, Spain

12:20-13:50 Lunch break

13:50-15:10 Poster Session 2: Morphology & NLP Applications and NLP Tools
Techniques for Arabic Morphological Detokenization and Orthographic Denormalization
Ahmed El Kholy and Nizar Habash
Center for Computational Learning Systems, Columbia University, USA

Tagging Amazigh with AncoraPipe
Mohamed Outahajala (1), Lahbib Zenkouar (2), Paolo Rosso (3) and Antònia Martí (4)
(1) IRCAM,
(2) Mohammadia School of Engineers, Med V University Rabat, Morocco,
(3) Natural Language Engineering Lab. - ELiRF, Universidad Politécnica Valencia, Spain,
(4) CLiC - Centre de Llenguatge i Computació, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Verb Morphology of Hebrew and Maltese - Towards an Open Source Type Theoretical Resource Grammar in GF
Dana Dannélls (1) and John J. Camilleri (2)
(1) Department of Swedish Language, University of Gothenburg, Sweden;
(2) Department of Intelligent Computer Systems, University of Malta, Malta

Syllable Based Transcription of English Words into Perso-Arabic Writing System
Jalal Maleki
Dept. of Computer and Information Science, Linkping University, Sweden

COLABA: Arabic Dialect Annotation and Processing
Mona Diab, Nizar Habash, Owen Rambow, Mohamed Al Tantawy and Yassine Benajiba
Center for Computational Learning Systems, Columbia University, USA
A Linguistic Search Tool for Semitic Languages

Alon Itai
Knowledge Center for Processing Hebrew, Computer Science Department, Technion, Israel

13:50-15:10 Poster Session 3: Speech & Related resources

Algerian Arabic Speech database Project (ALGASD): Description and Research Applications
Ghania Droua-Hamdani (1), Sid Ahmed Selouani (2) and Malika Boudraa (3)
(1) Speech Processing Laboratory (TAP), CRSTDLA, Algiers, Algeria;
(2) LARIHS Laboratory, University of Moncton, Canada;
(3) Speech Communication Laboratory, USTHB, Algiers, Algeria.

Integrating Annotated Spoken Maltese Data into Corpora of Written Maltese
Alexandra Vella (1,2), Flavia Chetcuti (1), Sarah Grech (1) and Michael Spagnol (3)
(1)University of Malta, Malta
(2)University of Cologne, Germany
(3) University of Konstanz , German

A Web Application for Dialectal Arabic Text Annotation
Yassine Benajiba and Mona Diab
Center for Computational Learning Systems, Columbia University, USA

Towards a Psycholinguistic Database for Modern Standard Arabic
Sami Boudelaa and William David Marslen-Wilson
MRC-Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Oral Session 2 : Resources and tools for Machine Translation

15:10-15:30 Creating Arabic-English Parallel Word-Aligned Treebank Corpora
Stephen Grimes, Xuansong Li, Ann Bies, Seth Kulick, Xiaoyi Ma and Stephanie Strassel
Linguistic Data Consortium, USA

15:30-15:50 Using English as a Pivot Language to Enhance Danish-Arabic Statistical Machine Translation
Mossab Al-Hunaity, Bente Maegaard and Dorte Hansen
Center for Language Technology , University of Copenhagen, Denmark

15:50-16:10 Using a Hybrid Word Alignment Approach for Automatic Construction and Updating of Arabic to French Lexicons
Nasredine Semmar
CEA LIST, France

16:10-16:30 Coffee break

16:30-17:20 General Discussion
Cooperation Roadmap for building a sustainable Human Language Technologies for the Arabic language within and outside the Arabic world.

17:20-17:30 Concluding remarks and Closing

Important Dates

HM — 2010-05-05T12:40:50Z

Deadline for abstract submissions: 6 March 2010 Notification of acceptance: 15 March 2010 Final version of accepted paper: 11 April 2010 Workshop full-day: 17 May 2010 - Important Dates / ouvert_rubrique

Description

2010-02-24T14:19:34Z

The Semitic family includes languages and dialects spoken by a large number of native speakers (around 300 million). Prominent members of this family are Arabic (and its varieties), Hebrew, Amharic, Tigrinya, Aramaic, Maltese and Syriac. Their shared ancestry is apparent through pervasive cognate sharing, a rich and productive pattern-based morphology, and similar syntactic constructions. In addition, there are several languages which are used in the same geographic area such as Amazigh or Coptic, which, while not Semitic, have common features with Semitic languages, such as borrowed vocabulary.

The recent surge in computational work for processing Semitic languages, particularly Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Modern Hebrew (MH), has brought modest improvements in terms of actual empirical results for various language processing components (e.g., morphological analyzers, parsers, named entity recognizers, audio transcriptions, etc.). Apparently, reusing existing approaches developed for English or French for processing Semitic language text/speech, e.g., Arabic parsing is not as straightforward as initially thought. Apart from the limited availability of suitable language resources, there is increasing evidence that Semitic languages demand modeling approaches and annotations that deviate from those found suitable for English/French. Issues such as the pattern-based morphology, the frequently head-initial syntactic structure, the importance of the interface between morphology and syntax, and the difference between spoken and written forms (especially in Colloquial Arabic(s)) exemplify the kind of challenges that may arise when processing Semitic languages. For language technologies, such as information retrieval and machine translation, these challenges are compounded by sparse data and often result in poorer performance than for other languages.

This Workshop intends to follow on topics of paramount importance for Semitic-language NLP that were discussed at previous events (LREC, MEDAR/NEMLAR Conferences, the workshops of the ACL Special Interest Group for Semitic languages, etc.) and which are worth revisiting.

The workshop will bring together people who are actively involved in Semitic language processing in a mono- or cross/multilingual context, and give them an opportunity to update the community through reports on completed or ongoing work as well as on the availability of LRs, evaluation protocols and campaigns, products and core technologies (in particular open source ones). We also invite authors to address other languages spoken in the Semitic language area (languages such as Amazigh, Coptic, etc.). This should enable participants to develop a common view on where we stand and to foster the discussion of the future of this research area. Particular attention will be paid to activities involving technologies such as Machine Translation and Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval/Extraction, Summarization, etc. Evaluation methodologies and resources for evaluation of HLT will be also a main focus.

We expect to elaborate on the HLT state of the art, identify problems of common interest, and debate on a potential roadmap for the Semitic languages. Issues related to sharing of resources, tools, standards, sharing and dissemination of information and expertise, adoption of current best practices, setting up joint projects and technology transfer mechanisms will be an important part of the workshop.