ANLP - IEEE CIST'16

ANLP Session

Second Invited Session on Arabic Natural Language Processing:
Models, Systems, Data and Applications

After the success of the first edition, the Second Invited Session on “Arabic Natural Language Processing: Models, Systems, Data and Applications” will be held on October 24-26, 2016 within IEEE CIST’16, in Tangier-Assilah Morocco.
Language technologies and digital resources such as lexical databases, ontologies and corpora are instrumental to millions of people who use them every day without even being aware of them. Systems like Google Translate and web search engines rely more and more on levels of linguistic information automatically provided through NLP tools, and on huge repositories of structured language data. This development has deeply affected the way we think about language from a scientific perspective. Linguists have progressively turned their focus from abstract properties of language to the dynamics of its usage in communicative contexts. There is increasing awareness that language digital repositories, technologies and computational models of language processes not only shed considerable light on traditional issues in language and literary studies but may also lead to a radical reconceptualization of them. Aspects of language acquisition, lexical access, speech recognition, text translation, text analysis, ontology extraction, reading and optical character recognition can be put to a rigorous empirical test through computer simulations. Likewise, corpora, lexical databases and ontologies have helped us focus on the nature of language data from a different perspective. From this standpoint, digital data and computer technologies provide an empirical middle ground where interdisciplinary insights can be empirically assessed and integrated.
This special session is intended to explore and debate the contribution of computational language models and language data to a better understanding of linguistic, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, historical and literary issues of the Arabic language and culture. We particularly welcome contributions addressing fundamental aspects of Arabic NLP, communication technology, language resources and automated text analysis by looking at their implications for both state-of-the-art language technologies and Arabic language knowledge at large.

TOPICS

We solicit submission of original ideas and papers describing significant results and developments from both researchers and practitioners in a specific range of fields addressing the following topics:

Information retrieval and extraction
Text mining
Named entity recognition
Question answering
Word sense disambiguation
Machine Translation
Stochastic language models
Connectionist language models
Language technologies for Arabic cultural heritage
Arabic optical character recognition
Arabic digital epigraphy

CHAIRS

Vito Pirrelli, ILC CNR, Pisa Italy
Arsalane Zarghili, FST USMBA, Fez Morocco

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Prof Anouar BOUDHIR, FST, UAE, Tangier, Morocco
Prof. Badreddine El Mohajir, FS, UAE, Tetuan, Morocco
Prof. Mohammed Al Achhab, ENSA, UAE, Tetuan, Morocco

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

Abderrahim Benabbou, FST Fez, USMBA Fez Morocco
Houda Bouamor, Carnegie Mellon University, Qatar
Sami Boudelaa, Department of Linguistics University Al Ain, United Arab Emirates
Karim Bouzoubaa, EMI, UM5 Rabat Morocco
Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, Al Akhawayn University, Morocco
Ilham Chaker, FST University of Fez, Morocco
Mohamed El Hannach, FLSH Fez, USMBA Fez Morocco
Yacine El Younoussi, ENSA of Tetuan, Morocco
Mohamed Fakir, FSTBM, USMS Beni Mellal Morocco
Nizar Habash New York University Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Nabil Hathout, CNRS Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, France
Jamal Kharroubi, FST Fez, USMBA Fez Morocco
Abdelmonaime Lachkar, ENSAF, USMBA Fez Morocco
Abdelhak Lakhouaja, FS Oujda, UMP Oujda Morocco
Giuliano Lancioni, University of Roma 3 Italy
Azzedine Mazroui, University of Oujda, Morocco
Said Ouatik El Alaloui, FSDM, USMBA Fez Morocco
Ouafae Nahli, Institute for Computational Linguistics CNR, Pisa Italy
Vito Pirrelli, Institute for Computational Linguistics CNR, Pisa Italy
Azeddine Rhazi, FLSH Marrakech-UCAM Marrakech Morocco
Horacio Rodriguez, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona Spain
Abdelhadi Soudi, ENIM, Rabat Morocco
Youssef Tahir University Hassan 2 of Casablanca Morocco
François Yvon, LIMSI CNRS Université de Paris-Sud, France
Arsalane Zarghili, FST University of Fez, Morocco
Ahmed Zinedine, FSDM, USMBA Fez Morocco

PAPERS SUBMISSIONS
Prospective authors should submit, by using the online paper submission platform, a paper of 4 to 6 maximum, including references in scholarly English and describing their original work using the IEEE template.

PUBLICATIONS
Accepted papers will be indexed in the IEEE Xplore Library, Scopus and DBLP. Furthermore, authors of high quality contributions will be invited to submit an extended version of their work for potential publication in a special issue/section of an international journal.
Accepted papers must be registered otherwise, they will not be included in the IEEE Xplore Library. At least one of the co-authors of every paper should register.

DEADLINES
Paper Submission May 15, 2016 ~~April 30, 2016~~
Acceptance Notification June 30, 2016
Camera-ready Submission July 15, 2016
Author Registration July 30, 2016