Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop
WANLP 2015
Workshop on Arabic Natural Language Processing
Including the Second Shared Task on Automatic Arabic Error Correction
Collocated with ACL-IJCNLP 2015, Beijing, China
Workshop Program
IMPORTANT DATES
11 January 2015: First Call for Workshop Papers
19 February 2015: Second Call for Workshop Papers
21 May 2015 (was 14 May 2015): Workshop Paper Due Date
8 June 2015 (was 4 June 2015): Notification of Acceptance
21 June 2015: Camera-ready papers due
30 July 2015: Workshop Dates
Workshop Website: http://www.arabic-nlp.net/wanlp
For Shared Task important dates, see below.
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
There has been a lot of progress in the last 15 years in the area of Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP). Many Arabic NLP (or Arabic NLP-related) workshops and conferences have taken place, both in the Arab World and in association with international conferences. This workshop follows in the footsteps of previous efforts to provide a forum for researchers to share and discuss their ongoing work.
We invite submissions on topics that include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Basic core technologies: morphological analysis, disambiguation, tokenization, POS tagging, named entity detection, chunking, parsing, semantic role labeling, sentiment analysis, Arabic dialect modeling, etc.
- Applications: machine translation, speech recognition, speech synthesis, optical character recognition, pedagogy, assistive technologies, social media, etc.
- Resources: dictionaries, annotated data, specialized databases etc.
Submissions may include work in progress as well as finished work. Submissions must have a clear focus on specific issues pertaining to the Arabic language whether it is standard Arabic, dialectal, or mixed. Descriptions of commercial systems are welcome, but authors should be willing to discuss the details of their work. Submissions are expected to be 8 pages long plus 2 pages for references. Associated with the workshop will be a shared task on Arabic text error correction (details below).
ACCEPTED PAPERS
Main Workshop Papers
EDRAK: Entity-Centric Data Resource for Arabic Knowledge
Mohamed H. Gad-elrab, Mohamed Amir Yosef and Gerhard Weikum
POS-tagging of Tunisian Dialect Using Standard Arabic Resources and Tools
Ahmed Hamdi, Alexis Nasr, Nizar Habash and Nuria Gala
Joint Arabic Segmentation and Part-Of-Speech Tagging
Shabib AlGahtani and John McNaught
A Conventional Orthography for Algerian Arabic
Houda Saadane and Nizar Habash
Deep Learning Models for Sentiment Analysis in Arabic
Ahmad Al Sallab, Hazem Hajj, Gilbert Badaro, Ramy Baly, Wassim El Hajj and Khaled Bashir Shaban
Annotating Targets of Opinions in Arabic using Crowdsourcing
Noura Farra, Kathy McKeown and Nizar Habash
Best Practices for Crowdsourcing Dialectal Arabic Speech Transcription
Samantha Wray, Hamdy Mubarak and Ahmed Ali
A Light Lexicon-based Mobile Application for Sentiment Mining of Arabic Tweets
Gilbert Badaro, Ramy Baly, Rana Akel, Linda Fayad, Jeffrey Khairallah, Hazem Hajj, Khaled Shaban and Wassim El-Hajj
Multi-Reference Evaluation for Dialectal Speech Recognition System: A Study for Egyptian ASR
Ahmed Ali, Walid Magdy and Steve Renals
DIWAN: A Dialectal Word Annotation Tool for Arabic
Faisal Al-Shargi and Owen Rambow
Classifying Arab Names Geographically
Hamdy Mubarak and Kareem Darwish
Robust Part-of-Speech Tagging of Arabic Text
Hanan Aldarmaki and Mona Diab
Answer Selection in Arabic Community Question Answering: A Feature-Rich Approach
Yonatan Belinkov, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño and Hamdy Mubarak
Natural Language Processing for Dialectical Arabic: A Survey
Abdulhadi Shoufan and Sumaya Alameri
A Pilot Study on Arabic Multi-Genre Corpus Diacritization
Houda Bouamor, Wajdi Zaghouani, Mona Diab, Ossama Obeid, Kemal Oflazer, Mahmoud Ghoneim and Abdelati Hawwari
Shared Task Papers
The Second QALB Shared Task on Automatic Text Correction for Arabic
Alla Rozovskaya, Houda Bouamor, Nizar Habash, Wajdi Zaghouani, Ossama Obeid and Behrang Mohit
QCRI@QALB-2015 Shared Task: Correction of Arabic Text for Native and Non-Native Speakers’ Errors
Hamdy Mubarak, Kareem Darwish and Ahmed Abdelali
Arib@QALB-2015 Shared Task: A Hybrid Cascade Model for Arabic Spelling Error Detection and Correction
Nouf AlShenaifi, Rehab AlNefie, Maha Al-Yahya and Hend Al-Khalifa
SAHSOH@QALB-2015 Shared Task: A Rule-Based Correction Method of Common Arabic Native and Non-Native Speakers’ Errors
Wajdi Zaghouani, Taha Zerrouki and Amar Balla
GWU-HASP-2015@QALB‐2015 Shared Task: Priming Spelling Candidates with Probability
Mohammed Attia, Mohamed Al-Badrashiny and Mona Diab
QCMUQ@QALB-2015 Shared Task: Combining Character level MT and Error-tolerant Finite-State Recognition for Arabic Spelling Correction
Houda Bouamor, Hassan Sajjad, Nadir Durrani and Kemal Oflazer
UMMU@QALB-2015 Shared Task: Character and Word level SMT pipeline for Automatic Error Correction of Arabic Text
Fethi Bougares and Houda Bouamor
TECHLIMED@QALB-Shared Task 2015: a hybrid Arabic Error Correction System
Djamel MOSTEFA, Jaber ABUALASAL, Omar ASBAYOU, Mahmoud GZAWI and Ramzi Abbès
QALB 2015 Shared Task: CUFE Arabic Error Correction System
Michael Nawar
SHARED TASK DESCRIPTION
Following the success of the First Shared Task on Automatic Arabic Error Correction in the Arabic NLP Workshop 2014 (WANLP-2014, EMNLP, Doha), we will conduct the Second Shared Task on Automatic Arabic Error Correction as part of WANLP-2015.
Similar to the 2014 competition, the task relies on resources created under the Qatar Arabic Language Bank (QALB) project. In addition to the correction of Arabic native text (news comments), the 2015 shared task will include an additional correction of non-native texts.
In order to participate, you need to use this link to register and receive the training data. Also you need to subscribe to the QALB discussion group to receive the shared task notifications.
Participants are expected to also submit a short system description paper (4 pages + 2 for references).
The following FAQ page describes the steps for participating in the shared task. In summary, the shared task will use the following calendar:
- February 15: Release of the initial training data
- April 1: Final Release of the training data
- April 30: Registration deadline
- May 16: Test set available
- May 28: Systems' outputs collected
- June 3: System description paper deadline
- June 10: Shared task results and answers keys to be announced
- June 10: Shared task paper notification
- June 21: Camera ready deadline for the system description paper
- July 30: ACL 2015 Workshop in Beijing
PAPER SUBMISSION INSTRUCTION
Submission Types
There are two possible submissions types:
Full papers of maximum 8 pages + 2 for references
Shared Task System papers of maximum 4 pages + 2 for references AND authors must have participated in the shared task
Blind Reviewing Policy
The workshop follows a blind reviewing policy. The authors should omit their names and affiliations from the paper and avoid self-references that reveal their identity. Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.
Submission Format
All submissions must be electronic in PDF and must be formatted using the ACL 2015 style files available at http://acl2015.org/call_for_papers.html
Submission Site
Papers should be submitted via the START Conference Manager at :
https://www.softconf.com/acl2015/ArabicNLP/
Please do not send papers by email to the organizers. Such papers will not be considered.
Multiple Submission Policy
Papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must indicate this at submission time. Authors must inform organizers immediately once a paper is to be withdrawn from the workshop for any reason. Attempting to publish the same paper or with a large overlap (50%) may lead to rejection of the paper even after an acceptance notification have gone out.
ORGANIZERS
Program Co-chairs
Nizar Habash, New York University Abu Dhabi
Stephan Vogel, Qatar Computing Research Institute
Kareem Darwish, Qatar Computing Research Institute
Publication Co-chairs
Nadi Tomeh, Paris 13 University
Houda Bouamor, Carnegie Mellon University Qatar
Publicity Chair
Wajdi Zaghouani, Carnegie Mellon University Qatar
Shared Task Committee
Alla Rozovskaya (co-chair), Columbia University
Houda Bouamor (co-chair), Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar
Behrang Mohit, Ask.com
Wajdi Zaghouani, Carnegie Mellon University Qatar
Ossama Obeid, Carnegie Mellon University Qatar
Nizar Habash (advisor), New York University Abu Dhabi
Program Committee