Special Issue: Call for Papers
Journal of King Saud University Computer and Information Sciences
Official Journal of KSU – College of Computer and Information Sciences

Guest Editors:
• Eric Atwell– Associate Professor, Language research group, I-AIBS institute for artificial intelligence and biological systems, School of computing, Faculty of engineering, University of Leeds.
• Khaled Shaalan– Associate Professor at Faculty of Computers & Information, Cairo Univ. (on Secondment to The British University in Dubai).
• ImedZitouni–PhD, Principal Researcher at Microsoft, Member of the Relevance and Measurement team of Microsoft.

Arabic NLP: Current State and Future Challenges

About the Journal:
The Journal of King Saud University - Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) is produced and hosted by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University (KSU). The CIS Journal publishes peer-reviewed research articles in computer and information sciences; it was founded in 1994 and is published in http://ees.elsevier.com/jksu-cis/.

Abstract:
Arabic is a member of the Semitic languages family that uses a distinct alphabet set and spoken by more than 340 million individuals as their first language. It is the official language, either solely or jointly, in twenty countries located in the Middle East and Africa. Arabic is the language of the Holly Qur’aan and one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

Arabic Natural language processing (NLP) is still in its initial stage compared to the work in English and other languages. NLP is made possible by the collaboration of many disciplines including computer science, linguistics, mathematics, psychology and artificial intelligence. The results of which are highly beneficial for many applications such as machine translation, Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, text summarization and Question Answering.

This special issue of CCIS Journal is intended to present the current state of research on Arabic NLP, Arabic computational linguistics, and related areas. We welcome unpublished high quality papers (in English) on current state of Arabic NLP including, but not limited to:
• Part of Speech Tagging
• Morphological analysis and generation
• Word sense and Syntactic disambiguation
• Transliteration, transcription and diacritization
• Named Entity Recognition
• Corpus Linguistics (corpora, electronic dictionaries, treebanks, etc.)
• Machine Translation
• Information Extraction
• Information Retrieval
• Question Answering
• Semantic and Sentiment analysis
• Text Clustering, Classification and Summarization

Important dates:
Submission of extended abstracts (300-500 words): October 1st 2013
Notification of proposal acceptance: November 1st 2013
Submission of full papers: January 30th 2014
Notification of paper acceptance: March 30th 2014
Final version submission: May 31st 2014
Publication date: November 2014

Submission System: http://ees.elsevier.com/jksu-cis/

Special Issue Editor:
Hend Al-Khalifa – Associate professor, Information Technology Department,
College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University
hendk@ksu.edu.sa