The 3rd Palestinian Symposium on Computational Linguistics and Arabic Content (iArabic’2014)

People who are interested to contribute to the Symposium are encouraged to submit a short abstract (300-600 words) to sina@birzeit.edu by 1/4/2014. Submissions can be research-oriented, applications and use cases, or problem specification. Welcoming work in progress and not only completed work. The best submissions will be then selected for presentation. All abstracts and presentations will be published on the website of the Symposium. Keynote: Mona Diab, George Washington University. Computational Modeling of Sociopragmatic language use in Arabic and English Social Media: Subgroup Detection.

About:

Arabic is one of the most spoken languages worldwide. Despite its old and rich culture and content, its religious and political significance, and the economical importance of its speaking communities, however little success was achieved in developing Arabic-based technologies and Arabic content on the Web. One of the main reasons is that, research in this topic was mostly conducted by non-Arabic speaking researchers –with a limited engagement of Arab researchers. The goal of this symposium is: to encourage research on Arabic technologies and content at Palestine universities; to encourage cooperation between researchers in IT, linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive sciences, philosophy, and other disciplines; to strengthen the relationship between academia and industry for developing smart language-based applications; and to enable networking and cooperation on future project proposals.

Target Audience:

1. Researchers and students in IT-related fields.
2. Researchers and students in linguistics and psycholinguistics fields.
3. Researchers and students in Philosophy, cognitive sciences, and other related fields.
4. Companies developing or using Arabic technologies.
5. Public and private institutions using Arabic technologies or facing language-related challenges.

Topics:

We welcome presentations about ongoing research, as well as, applications and use cases related the following topics:

• Arabic and Natural Language Processing: multilingual search engines, stemming, tagging summarization, translation, generation, named-entity recognition, OCR, data mining, question answering, speech recognition, word sense disambiguation, cross-lingual information retrieval.
• Linguistic Resources and Corpus Engineering.
• Creating and Consuming Arabic Content on the Web.
• Social Media and Arabic Content.
• Arabic Libraries and Archives.
• Big Data NLP and Multilingualism

Scientific Committee:

• Mustafa Jarrar, Birzeit University
• Adnan Yahya, Birzeit University
• Nizar Habash, Columbia University
• Fayeq Oweis, Google
• Bassem Sayrafi, Birzeit University
• Mahdi Arar, Birzeit University
• Bilal Alshafei, Al Najah University
• Rebhi Baraka, Islamic Univerity of Gaza
• Hashem Tamimi, Palestine Polytechnic University
• Yahya Al-Salqan, Jaffa.Net Computer Systems
• Mamoun Abu Helou, Birzeit University
• Naseer Zalmout, Birzeit University

Program:

8:30-9:00	Registration
9:00-9:30	Opening of the symposium Dr. Mustafa Jarrar, Director of Sina Institute, Birzeit University Dr. Henrry Jagaman, VP for Academic Affairs, Birzeit University H.E. Dr Safa Nasser Eldin, The Minister of Telecommunication and Information Technology
9:30-10:50	Session I: Arabic Text to Speech. Chair: Bilal Shafei Holy Quran‐Based Arabic Text To Speech. Bana Akram Al‐Sharif and Radwan Tahboub(Palestine Polytechnic University), Labib Arafeh(AlQuds University) Arabic Mobile Diacriziation With Text To Voice. Iyad Abu Samrah and Labib Arafeh (AlQuds University), Asma Sbeih (AL-Ahliya University) Automatic Ontology-Based Document Annotation For Arabic Information Retrieval. Ashraf Kaloub (Alaqsa Community College), Rebhi Baraka(Islamic University of Gaza) Towards Building A Corpus For Palestinian Dialect. Diyam Akra and Mustafa Jarrar (Birzeit University)
10:50-11:10	Coffee Break
11:10-11:40	Session II: Real Life Cases. Chair: Mahmoud Al-Saheb Linguistic Challenges In The Palestinian Land Authority system. Nihad Awad ( Palestinian Land Authority) Manshar – Arabic Publishing Platform. Mohammad Khatib (Google), Hammam Samara (Bazar), Morad Taleeb (Visualizing Palestine), Amr Tamimi (FeCash), Rasha Khatib (Manshar),Jamal Shaheen (Arabiana) Characterization Of The Subject Name For Computational Linguistics. Sadeq Aldabas (AL-Ahliya University)
11:40-12:40	Session III: Automatic Correction And Summarization For Arabic Text. Chair: Nasser Zalmout A Methodology For Automatic Diacriziation Of Modern Standard Arabic. Ahmed Hashem (Cairo University) Toward Automatic Linguistic Characterization For Text Sumrization. Abed Aljbar Alhroub (Masar Center For Political Research) The Treatment Of Some Deviation Cases In Non-Standard Data Using NLP Applied to Arabic Language. Bilal Shafei (An-Najah National University)
12:40-1:30	Lunch Break
1:30-2:30	Session IV: Arabic IR and NLP. Chair: Mahdi Arar Automatic Part Of Speech Tagging And Its Role In Arabic NLP. Dia’ Abu Zeina, Mahmoud Alsaheb (Palestine Polytechnic University) Image Retrieval System Based On Arabic Ontology. Samah Kareem, Badai sartawai (AlQuds University) Assessment Tools For Enhancing The Quality And Retrieval Efficiency Of Arabic Web Content. Ali Salhi, Adnan Yahya (Birzeit University)
2:30-2:50	Coffee Break
2:50-4:00	Session V: Keynote Speech. Chaired by Bassem Sayrafi Mona Diab, George Washington University. Computational Modeling of Sociopragmatic language use in Arabic and English Social Media: Subgroup Detection.
4:00-4:30	Discussion Session

Photos Album:

Organized by:

Sina Institute for Knowledge Engineering and Arabic Technologies Faculty Of Information Technology , Birzeit University,Palestine. Back to Top ⇑