ACL2007 Workshop on
Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages
28th & 29th June 2007

n.b. workshop is spread over 2 mornings

About the Workshop

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. These include, among others, the Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (ACL 2001, Toulouse, France), the workshop on Arabic Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2002, Las Palmas, Canary Islands), a special session on Arabic processing in Traitement Automatique du Langage Naturel (TALN 2004, Fes, Morocco), the NEMLAR Arabic Language Resources and Tools Conference (2004, Cairo, Egypt), the Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages (ACL 1998, Montreal, Canada and ACL 2005, Ann Arbor, USA), and most recently The Challenge of Arabic for NLP/MT (October 2006, London, U.K.). The increase in attention to Arabic has been coupled with a surge in computational resources for this language, made available to the community by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and by the European Language Resources Association (ELRA/ELDA). 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.

We invite submissions 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, heightens awareness amongst Semitic-language researchers of shared challenges and breakthroughs, and highlights issues and solutions common to all Semitic languages. Also, the workshop will be an opportunity for the Special Interest Group on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages (the SIG) to meet and discuss future direction in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing approaches to Semitic Languages.