English | عربي
Sina Institute for Knowledge Management and Arabic Technologies organized the 3rd Palestinian Symposium on Computational Linguistics and Arabic Content, iArabic, on April 12th. Dr Safa’a Nasser Eldin, the minister of the Palestinian Telecommunication and Information Technology Ministry, inaugurated the symposium, with the participation of many researchers of various Palestinian universities, institutes and companies, which discussed the latest researches and projects within the domain of Arabic language technologies.
Dr Henry Giacman, the Vise President of Academic Affairs at Birzeit University, then discussed the scientific research scene in Palestine. Dr Giacman stressed on the importance of supporting scientific research, and urged the Palestinian researchers to concentrate on the research problems relevant to the Palestinian and Arabic scopes, in addition to discussing the importance of cooperation and knowledge exchange between the Palestinian researchers.
Thirteen researches were presented at the iArabic symposium, divided into 5 sessions. The first session involved four researches concerned with the automated processing of Arabic speech and diacritics, and the local Palestinian dialects, which was moderated by Dr Bilal Shafe. The second session, which was moderated by Dr Mahmoud Al-Saheb, concentrated at three practical applications and experiences from the local Palestinian scene, including a participation from the Palestinian Land Authority. The third session also discussed three researches on the topics of automatic summarisation and correction of Arabic texts, and was moderated by the researcher Nasser Zalmout. And finally, three researches were presented at the last session, which discussed the topics of automatic annotation of Arabic texts, an Arabic ontology for photos retrieval, and tools to enhance the quality of retrieved Arabic texts. The session was moderated by Dr Mahdi Arar.
Dr. Mona Diab, from George Washington University in the US, presented the symposium’s keynote lecture entitled “Computational Modeling of Socio-pragmatic language use in Arabic and English Social Media: Subgroup Detection”. The lecture was then followed by vibrant discussions with attendance regarding many of the points Dr Diab discussed at her lecture, which was moderated by Dr Bassem Sayrafi.
It is worth mentioning that the participating researchers came from diverse backgrounds, including computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and statistics, among other fields. In addition to active participation from the Palestinian IT industry. The symposium was live streamed over the internet, and there were many contributions and participation from Gaza Strip, Egypt and the United States, via video conferencing.
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See the photo album: iArabic2014
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