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J E P 2 0 0 4 - T A L N 2 0 0 4
- Special Session -
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ARABIC LANGUAGE PROCESSING

Call for Papers
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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

**** only for the PC members *****
According to the detailed calendar below :
- Submission deadline: 15 January 2004
- Submissions sent to the reviewers : 22 January 2004
- Reviews ready and sent back : 13 February 2004
- Notification to authors: 20 February 2004
- Corrections sent back : 27 February 2004
- Corrections validation : 05 March 2004
- Camera-ready: 8 March 2004
- Conference: 19-22 April 2004
**** only for the PC members *****


SELECTION, LANGUAGES AND SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Please check the available information on the
conference web site :
http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/jep-taln04/

SUBMISSION ADDRESS

Electronic submissions, with the message object
"JEP-TALN-2004-Arabic", have to be sent to the following
email address :
< jep-taln04-arabic@... >

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

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

or

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

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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.boualem@...
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