The Challenge of Arabic for NLP/MT

 

International Conference

at The British Computer Society (BCS)

London

23 October 2006

 

Contents

 

Keynote Speaker (Professor Anne de Roek, Open University, UK)               3

 

Challenges to Arabic NLP

 

Challenges in Processing Colloquial Arabic. Alla Rozovskaya (presenter), Richard Sproat, Elabbas Benmamoun (University of Illinois, USA)                                     4

 

Arabic WordNet and the Challenges of Arabic. Sabri Elkateb (presenter), William Black (University of Manchester, UK), Piek Vossen (Irion Technologies, The Netherlands), David Farwell, Horacio Rodríguez (University of Catalonia, Spain), Adam Pease (Articulate Software Inc., USA), Musa Alkhalifa (University of Barcelona, Spain), Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton University, USA)             15

 

Tips and Tricks of the Prague Arabic Dependency Treebank. Otakar Smrž (Charles University, Czech Republic)              25

 

Diacritization: A Challenge to Arabic Treebank Annotation and Parsing. Mohamed Maamouri (presenter), Seth Kulick, Ann Bies (University of Pennsylvania, USA)      35

 

An Ambiguity-Controlled Morphological Analyzer for Modern Standard Arabic Modeling Finite State Networks.

Mohammed A. Attia (University of Manchester, UK)      48

 

Effective Stemming for Arabic Information Retrieval. Youssef Kadri (presenter), Jian-Yun Nie (University of Montreal, Canada)                   68

 

Applications and Resources

 

Automatic Transliteration of Proper Nouns from Arabic to English. Mehdi M. Kashani (presenter), Fred Popowich (Simon Fraser University, Canada), Fatiha Sadat (National Research Council, Canada)        76

 

Standard Arabic Formalization and Linguistic Platform for its Analysis. Slim Mesfar (Université de Franche-Comté, France)          84

 

Using Cross-language Information Retrieval for Sentence Alignment.

Nasredine Semmar (presenter), Meriama Laib, Christian Fluhr (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique, France)                   95

 

DCU 250 Arabic Dependency Bank: An LFG Gold Standard Resource for the Arabic Penn Treebank. Yafa Al-Raheb (presenter), A. Akrout, J. van Genabith (Dublin City University, Eire)      105

 

Machine Translation

 

Problems of Arabic Machine Translation: Evaluation of Three Systems. Sattar Izwaini (Abu Dhabi University, UAE)    118

 

Mapping Interlingua Representations to Feature Structures of Arabic Sentences. Khaled Shaalan (British University in Dubai, UAE) (presenter), Azza Abdel Monem (Agriculture Research Center, Egypt), Ahmed Rafea (American University in Cairo, Egypt), Hoda Baraka (Cairo University, Egypt)       149