Fwd: Second CFP : JEP-TALN-2004 - Arabic NLP Text & Speech

[Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh at sharif dot edu>]

FYI,

roozbeh

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      J E P  2 0 0 4   -   T A L N  2 0 0 4
               - Special Session -
                      
            ARABIC LANGUAGE PROCESSING
                  TEXT & SPEECH
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              Second call for Papers
                      
               Palais des Congrès
                 Fez (Morocco)
                19-22 April 2004

      http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/jep-taln04/
      http://www.fsdmfes.ac.ma/jep-taln04/

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Due to its morphological, syntactic, phonetic and phonologic 
properties, the Arabic language is considered to be one of the most 
difficult languages for written and spoken language processing.

Research on written Arabic language processing started in the 1970s, 
even before the problems of Arabic text editing were completely 
solved.
The first studies focused primarily on lexicons and morphology.
In the past ten years, the internationalisation of the WWW and the 
proliferation of communication tools in Arabic have led to the need 
for a large number of Arabic NLP applications. As a result, research 
activity has extended to address more general areas of Arabic language 
processing, including syntactic analysis, machine translation, 
document indexing, information retrieval, etc.

Research on Arabic speech processing has made significant progress due 
to more improved signal processing technologies, and to recent 
advances in the knowledge of the prosodic and the segmental 
characteristics of Arabic and the acoustic modelling of Arab schemes. 
These results should make it possible to further progress in more 
innovative areas, such as Arabic speech recognition and synthesis, 
speech translation and automatic identification of a speaker and 
his/her geographic origin discrimination, etc.

The aim of the joint session is to gather and reinforce collaboration 
between researchers from both the written and spoken Arabic language 
processing communities. It will also offer the opportunity to discuss 
recent advances on both the scientific and application sides of the 
problem, in monolingual and multilingual contexts.

TOPICS

This special session on written and spoken Arabic processing includes 
(but is not limited to) the following topics :
- Speech recognition and comprehension,
- Text to speech synthesis,
- Automatic prosody generation,
- Automatic speaker and language identification,
- Geographic origin discrimination of Arabic speakers,
- Arabic corpora & resources,
- Speech acquisition for ASR and TTS systems,
- Morphology,
- Syntax,
- Semantics,
- Text parsing and generation,
- Discourse analysis,
- Text summarization,
- Dialogue,
- Machine translation.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline : 15 January 2004
Notification to authors : 20 February 2004 Camera-ready : 8 March 2004 
Conference : 19-22 April 2004

SELECTION CRITERIA
Authors are invited to submit original, previously unpublished 
research work.
Submissions will be reviewed by at least two experts.
Decisions will be based on the following criteria :
- importance and originality of the paper,
- soundness of the scientific and technical content,
- comparison of the results obtained with other relevant works,
- clarity of the exposition,
- relevance to the topics of the conference.

LANGUAGES
All papers should be written in English or French.

PAPER FORMAT
Submitted papers should be about 6 to 10 pages in Times 12pt, single 
spaced, including figures, examples and references.
Papers MUST be sent in PDF format. In particular cases, we might 
accept submissions in RTF (Word) format.

All the PostScript versions must be in A4 format, and not US Letter.
- Download the LaTeX stylesheet
<http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/jep-taln04/templates/arab-latex.tgz>
- Download the Word template (English version) <http://www.lpl.
univ-aix.fr/jep-taln04/templates/arabEN.dot>

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Electronic submissions with the message object "JEP-TALN-2004-Arabic"
should be sent to the following email address :
< jep-taln04-arabic at fsdmfes dot ac dot ma >

In case electronic submission is not possible, printed versions might 
be accepted. In this case, three hard-copies of the paper together 
with a floppy disk, should be sent to :

Malek Boualem
France Telecom R&D - DMI/GRI
2, avenue Pierre Marzin
22307 Lannion - France

or to

Noureddine Chenfour
Département de Math. et Informatique
Faculté des Sciences Dhar El Mahraz, Fès BP : 1796 Atlas, Fez - 
Morocco


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

- Abderrahim Benabbou, FST, Fez, Morocco.
- Mohammed Benkhalifa, Faculté des Sciences, Rabat, Morocco.
- Thami Benkirane, Sidi Mohammed University, Morocco.
- Malek Boualem, France Telecom R&D, France.
- Achraf Chalabi, Sakhr, Egypt.
- Noureddine Chenfour, Sidi Mohammed University, Fez, Morocco.
- Khalid Choukri, ELRA/ELDA, France.
- Fethi Debili, CNRS, Paris, France.
- Emilie De Neef, France Telecom R&D, France.
- Joseph Dichy, Lumière-Lyon 2 University, France.
- Everhard Ditters, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
- Mohamed Embarki, Laboratoire de Phonétique, Montpellier, France.
- Mohammed Hassoun, ENSSIB, Lyon, France.
- Med Tayeb Laskri, Badji Mokhtar University, Algeria.
- Fabrice Lefevre, LIMSI, Paris-Sud Orsay University, France.
- Chafic Mokbel, Balimand University, Lebanon.
- Abdelhak Mouradi, ENSIAS Rabat, Morocco.
- Omar Nouali, CERIST, Algeria.
- Abdenbi Rajouani, ENS, Fez, Morocco.
- Mustafa Yaseen, ATS Online, Jordan.
- Mohamed Yeou, Chouaib Doukkali El-Jadida University, Morocco.
- Chakir Zeroual, Sidi Mohamed University, Fez, Morocco.
- Adnane Zribi, ISG, Tunis University, Tunisia.

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Malek Boualem
France Telecom R&D - DMI/GRI
2, avenue Pierre Marzin - 22307 Lannion - France
Tel: (33)(0)2.96.05.29.83
Fax: (33)(0)2.96.05.32.86
Email: malek dot boualem at rd dot francetelecom dot com
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