Arabic Resources and Tools Conference

22-23 April 2009, Cairo, Egypt



Second Call for Papers



The second international conference on Arabic Language Resources and Tools is organised by the MEDAR consortium in Cairo, Egypt. MEDAR ((Mediterranean Arabic Language and Speech Technology) is a follow-up of NEMLAR, and is supported by the European Commission.



Dates

22-23 April 2009.



Conference web site: www.medar.info/conference. See the second Call for papers here. Deadline for abstracts of 800-1000 words is 30 January 2009, and there will be no extension! Submission is open.



Conference aims

Language Resources (LRs) are a central component of the linguistic infrastructure, necessary for the development of HLT applications and products, and therefore for industrial development.



In this conference we will focus on Arabic language technology and on the necessary language resources and tools for both research and commercial development of language technology for Arabic. Multilingual language technology is a particular focus, as well as general methodologies. The other important aspect for the promotion of Arabic language technology is cooperation: Cooperation is extremely important for the advancement of the field, be it cooperation between European, Arabic and American partners, cooperation between Arabic partners, cooperation between research and industry etc. MEDAR will present its first proposal for a Cooperation Roadmap, and will seek discussion and collaboration for its final version.



The aim of this conference is to provide a forum for the discussion of the state-of-the-art for Arabic resources and tools, in particular for machine translation and multilingual information retrieval, discuss problems and opportunities, exchange information regarding LRs and tools, their applications, ongoing and planned activities, industrial uses and needs, requirements coming from the new e-society, both with respect to policy issues and to technological and organisational ones.