First of all we wanted to bring together people who are actively involved in Arabic language and/or speech processing in a mono- or multilingual context, and give them an opportunity to report on completed and ongoing work as well as on the availability of products and core technologies. This should enable the participants to develop a common view on where we stand with respect to Arabic language processing.
Secondly, we wanted to identify problems of common interest, and possible mechanisms to move towards solutions, such as sharing of tools and resources, moving towards standards, sharing and dissemination of information and expertise, adoption of current best practices, setting up joint projects and technology transfer mechanisms, etc.
Third, we would like to enhance collaboration between the Arabic NLP community and the NLP community at large.

Description
Semitic languages are used by a significantly large population of native speakers and belong to a family that includes a large number of Arabic dialects (including classical Arabic), Maltese,Hebrew and other languages. These languages are characterised by a system of word formation based on tri-consonantal roots, a rich and productive morphology, a diversity of orthographic conventions and, unfortunately, a dearth of language resources suitable for computational research and development. Although there exists a body of CL research specifically targeted to individual Semitic languages, and there have been various workshops devoted to computing with Semitic Languages, much of the work to date remains the result of initiatives undertaken by individual researchers or research establishments. A direct consequence is that there is comparatively little awareness amongst practitioners of either the state of the art as practiced outside their own locality, the common challenges faced by all practitioners, or the potential for developing a coordinated approach

The Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), co-sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and U.S. Department of Defense, was started in 1992 as part of the TIPSTER Text program. Its purpose was to support research within the information retrieval community by providing the infrastructure necessary for large-scale evaluation of text retrieval methodologies.

COLING 2004 WORKSHOP
Computational Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the study of the languages of the Middle East, especially Arabic, Persian (Farsi), Pashto, Kurdish and Urdu. The usage of the Arabic script gives rise to certain issues that are common to all these languages despite their being of distinct language families. Hence, these languages share properties such as the absence of capitalization, right to left direction, lack of clear word boundaries, complex word structure, a high degree of ambiguity due to non-representation of short vowels in the writing system, and related encoding issues. Yet the research on these various languages have rarely been brought together in a single forum, and most development has been the result of initiatives by individual research establishments or industry firms.

The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for those involved in the development of NLP systems in Arabic script languages to exchange ideas, approaches and implementations of computational systems; to discuss the common challenges faced by all practitioners; and to assess the state of the art in the field. In addition, one of the aims of the workshop is to identify promising areas for future collaborative research in the development of NLP systems for Arabic script languages.

Motivation and Aims
Taking place on 1st June, after the main conference (29-30-31 MAY 2002), this post-conference workshop should add value to the issues addressed during the conference. It should bring together people who are actively involved in Arabic Written language and/or speech processing in a mono- or multilingual context, and give them an opportunity to report on completed and ongoing work as well as on the availability of LR, evaluation protocols and campaigns, products and core technologies. This should enable the participants to develop a common view on where we stand with respect to Arabic language processing.

We expect to identify problems of common interest, and possible mechanisms to move towards solutions, such as sharing of resources, tools, standards, sharing and dissemination of information and expertise, adoption of current best practices, setting up joint projects and technology transfer mechanisms, etc.

By bringing together players in the Arabic NLP field, we target the definition of a first broadly supported Roadmap for Arabic Language Resources, i.e. a broadly supported view on the longer, medium and shorter term needs and priorities. This would help the community to identify new opportunities and possible synergies.

Internationales Symposium: Dialektologoe semitscher Sprachen
19.-21. Februar 2002 der Universität Heidelberg Seminar für
 Sprachen und Kulturen des Vorderen Orients
Semitistik

Uni München:
Der nächste Allianz-Gastprofessor für Islamstudien an unserem Instiut wird Prof. Dr. Ibrahim Muhawi (Berkeley) sein. Er wird zum WS 2004/05 folgende Veranstaltungen (Termine werden noch bekanntgegeben) anbieten:

29. Deutscher Orientalistentag
"Barrieren - Passagen"

Noch bis zum 30. Januar 2005