The 2nd Palestinian Symposium on Computational Linguistics and Arabic Content (iArabic’2013)

Call for Presentation English | عربي

The 2nd Palestinian Symposium on Computational Linguistics and Arabic Content (iArabic’2013)

Date: 20 April 2013, Place:Sina Institute at Birzeit University

People who are interested to contribute to the Symposium are encouraged to submit a short abstract (300-600 words) to sina@birzeit.edu. Submissions can be research-oriented, applications and use cases, or problem specification. The best submissions will be then selected for presentation. All abstracts and presentations will be published on the website of the Symposium.

First Keynote: Translation and Localization at Google -Towards enriching the Arabic Content on the Web. Fayeq Oweis, Google.
Second Keynote: Arabic Natural Langauge Processing – Challenges and Opportunities. Nizar Habash. Columbia University.

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:

Researchers and students in IT-related fields.
Researchers and students in linguistics and psycholinguistics fields.
Researchers and students in Philosophy, cognitive sciences, and other related fields.
Companies developing or using Arabic technologies.
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, information retrieval .
Linguistic Resources and Corpus Engineering.
Creating and Consuming Arabic Content on the Web.
Social Media and Arabic Content.
Arabic Libraries and Archives.

Scientific Committee:

Mustafa Jarrar, Birzeit University, Palestine
Adnan Yahya, Birzeit University
Bassem Sayrafi, Birzeit University
Mahdi Arar, Birzeit University
Bilal Alshafei, Al Najah University
Rebhi Baraka, Islamic Univerity of Gaza
Hashem Tamimi, Palestine Polytechnic University
Fayeq Oweis, Google
Andrea Hawit, GSoft

Program:

8:00-8:30	Registration
8:30-8:40	Opening of the symposium
8:40-10:00	Session I: Arabic language in the software industry. chaired by Adnan Yahya gSoft Experience in the Development and Usage of TTS Technology. Mustafa Al-Tamim, gSoft company Arabic content in “Yamsafer” for Hotel booking online. Moaz Abu Goush, Yamsafer company Arabic content in mobile software. Husni Abu Samrah, Mobi Stine. Mobile Arabic – Practical Considerations. Yahya Al-Salqan, Jaffa.Net
10:00-10:10	Coffee Break
10:10-11:00	Session II: First Keynote Speech. chaired by Mahdi Arar Google Translation and Arabization, towards enriching the Arabic content, Fayeq Owes, Google
11:00-12:00	Session III: Dictionaries and lexicons engineering. chaired by Fayeq Owes, Google. Towards a general framework for a linguistic blog of the Arabic Historical Dictionary . Mahdi Arar, Birzeit University Arab term: a technical dictionary for the Arab world. Nicole Zarzar, German Jordanian University Digitizing and Integration of Arabic dictionaries. Mustafa Jarrar, Birzeit University.
12:00-12:40	Lunch Break
12:40-1:20	Session IV: Correction and summarization of Arabic Text. chaired by Bilal Shafei Arabic Text Correction Using Dynamic Categorized dictionaries: A statistical approach. Adnan Yahya, Ali Salhi, Birzeit University Automatic Arabic Text Summarization System (AATSS) Based on Semantic Features Extraction. Nabil M. Hewahi, Kathrein Abu Kwaik, Islamic University of Gaza.
1:20-1:30	Coffee Break
1:30-2:30	Session V: Automatic Morphological analysis. chaired by Mustafa Jarrar The Treatment of Some Deviation Cases in Non-Standard Data Using Natural Language Processing Applied to Arabic Language. Bilal Shafei, An-Najah National University A Prototype For Automatic Grammatical Rule Extraction For Arabic Language. Manal Tamimi, Ghadeer Al Natshah, Palestine Polytechnic University Using computer to extract Arabic roots. Maram Naeem, Asmaa Abo Ne’mah, Shatha Bani Fadl, An-Najah National University
2:30-2:40	Coffee Break
2:40-3:20	Session VI: Automatic speech recognition. chaired Hashem Tamimi Towards a better performance of Arabic Speech recognition systems. Dia’ Abu Zeina, Palestine Polytechnic University Palestinian Accent Recognition from Speech. Shahada Sammour, Nagham Addasi, Fatima Sabah, Abu Assaoud Hanani, Birzeit University.
3:20-3:30	Coffee Break
3:30-4:20	Session VII: Second Keynote Speech. chaired by Bassem Sayrafi Computing of Arabic language, Challenges and opportunities. Nizar Habash, Colombia University.
4:20-5:00	Discussion Session

Media:

Ma’an News Agency Archive

Palestine Network News Archive

Al Ayyam Newspaper Archive

Photos: