** APOLOGIES FOR MULTIPLE POSTINGS ** ********************************************************* 2nd and REVISED CALL FOR PAPERS ACL 2007 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages: Common Issues and Resources 28th June, 2007, Prague, Czech Republic NEW Submission deadline: 26 March 2007 Workshop Website: http://www.cs.um.edu.mt/~mros/casl07 Paper Submission Site: http://www.softconf.com/acl07/ACL07-WS3 ********************************************************* The ACL 2007 Workshop on "Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages: Common Issues and Resources" will be held in conjunction with the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and will take place on June 28th in Prague, Czech Republic. * SCOPE AND TOPICS The Semitic family includes many languages and dialects spoken by a large number of native speakers (around 300 million). However, Semitic languages as a whole are still understudied. The most prominent members of this family are Arabic (and its dialects), Hebrew, Amharic, Aramaic, Maltese and Syriac. Their shared ancestry is apparent through pervasive cognate sharing, a rich and productive pattern-based morphology, and similar syntactic constructions. An increasing body of computational linguistics work is starting to appear for both Arabic and Hebrew. Arabic alone, as the largest member of the Semitic family, has been receiving much attention lately via dedicated workshops and conferences. Tools and resources for other Semitic languages are being created at a slower rate. While corpora and some tools are necessarily language- specific, ideally there should be more cross-fertilization among research and development efforts for different Semitic languages. The proposed workshop aims to bring together researchers working on Semitic languages to share and discuss common issues and approaches to the processing of these languages. We invite submissions of novel work on all Semitic languages, including work describing recent state-of-the-art NLP systems and work leveraging resource and tool creation for the Semitic language family. We especially welcome submissions on work that crosses individual language boundaries and heightens awareness amongst Semitic-language researchers of shared challenges and common solutions. The workshop will also include a meeting of the Special Interest Group on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages (the ACL SIG). Examples of topics include, but are not limited to: * Computational approaches to phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics of Semitic languages * Tools for processing of Semitic languages (e.g. POS taggers, parsers, etc.) * Computational resources for Semitic languages * Comparative computational studies of Semitic languages * Leveraging resources in other languages (Semitic or other) to create resources and tools for Semitic languages * Empirical studies of unique/specific phenomena in Semitic languages * Text and speech applications for Semitic languages such as: - speech recognition, - machine translation, - summarization, - language generation, - speech synthesis, - co-reference resolution, - mention detection, - information retrieval, - spoken dialog applications - etc. * SUBMISSIONS Authors are invited to submit full papers on original, unpublished work in the topic area of this workshop. Papers should be submitted electronically and no later than March 26, 2007 through the following site: http://www.softconf.com/acl07/ACL07-WS3. Submissions should not exceed 8 pages and should be formatted using the ACL 2007 style files, which are available at: http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007/styles. The only accepted formats for submitted papers are Adobe PDF or postscript. The submissions interface provides for automatic conversion of postscript to PDF. Each submission will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee. The reviewing of the papers will be blind. In preparing your manuscript, do not include any information which could reveal your identity, or that of your co-authors. The title section of your manuscript should not contain any author names, email addresses, or affiliation status. If you do include any author names on the title page, your submission will be automatically rejected. In the body of your submission, you should eliminate all direct references to your own previous work. That is, avoid phrases such as "this contribution generalizes our results for XYZ". Also, please do not disproportionately cite your own previous work. In other words, make your submission as anonymous as possible. We need your cooperation in our effort to maintain a fair, blind reviewing process, and to consider all submissions equally. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. * IMPORTANT DATES March 26 -- Submission deadline for workshop papers April 22 -- Notification of acceptance April 29 -- Camera-ready version due June 28 -- Workshop held at ACL 2007 * CO-CHAIRS AND ORGANIZERS Violetta Cavalli-Sforza (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) - violetta@cs.cmu.edu Imed Zitouni (IBM Research, USA) - izitouni@us.ibm.com * PROGRAM COMMITTEE Sherif Mahdy Abdou (Cairo University, Egypt) Yaser Al-Onaizan (IBM, USA) Ann Bies (LDC/University of Pennsylvania, USA) Malek Boualem (France Telecom, France) Tim Buckwalter (LDC/University of Pennsylvania, USA) Achraf Chalabi (Sakhr Software Co., Egypt) Anne DeRoeck (Open University, UK) Mona Diab (Columbia University, USA) Joseph Dichy (University of Lyon 2, France) Abdelhamid ElJihad (Institut d'Etudes et Recherches sur l'Arabisation, Morocco) Martha W. Evens (Illinois Institute of Technology, USA) Ali Farghaly (Oracle, USA) Alexander Fraser (USC/ISI, USA) Andrew Freeman (Washington University, USA) Nizar Habash (Columbia University, USA) Alon Itai (Technion/Israel Institute of Technology, Israel) Steven Krauwer (Utrecht University, Netherlands) Alon Lavie (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) Mohamed F. Noamany (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) Uzzi Ornan (Technion, Israel) Slim Ouni (LORIA/University of Nancy 2, France) Mike Rosner (University of Malta, Malta) Khalil Sima'an (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) Abdelhadi Soudi (Ecole Nationale de l'Industrie Minérale, Morocco) Shuly Wintner (University of Haifa, Israel) Mustafa Yaseen (Amman University, Jordan) Abdellah Yousfi (Institut d'Etudes et Recherches sur l'Arabisation, Morocco)