Arabic is a challenging language for the field of computational linguistics. This is due to many factors including its complex and rich morphology, its high degree of ambiguity as well as the presence of a number of dialects that vary quite widely. Arabic is also a language with important geopolitical connections. It is spoken by over 400 million people in countries with varying degrees of prosperity and stability. It is the primary language of the latest world refugee problem affecting the Middle East and Europe. The opportunities that are made possible by working on this language and its dialects cannot be underestimated in their consequence on the Arab World, the Mediterranean Region and the rest of the World.
There has been a lot of progress in the last 20 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. Examples include the following:
This workshop follows in the footsteps of these efforts to provide a forum for researchers to share and discuss their ongoing work. This workshop is timely given the continued rise in research projects focusing on Arabic NLP.
We invite submissions on topics that include, but are not limited to, the following:
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. Papers on other languages sharing problems faced by Arabic NLP researchers such as Semitic languages or languages using Arabic script are welcome. Additionally, papers on efforts using Arabic resources but targeting other languages are also welcome. Descriptions of commercial systems are welcome, but authors should be willing to discuss the details of their work.
Associated with the workshop will be a shared task on Arabic dialect identification. As opposed to previous shared tasked which focused on regional level dialect labeling, this shared task will be the first to target a large set of dialect labels at the city and country levels.
May 3, 2019: Workshop Paper Due Date
May 10, 2019 (Deadline Extended): Workshop Paper Due Date
May 24, 2019: Notification of Acceptance
June 3, 2019: Camera-ready papers due
August 1, 2019: Workshop Date
Paper Length: Submissions are expected to be up to 8 pages long plus any number of pages for references. Final versions of long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account. Shared Task papers are also welcomed; refer to the Shared Task section below for details.
Submission Format: Submissions must be in PDF and prepared using LaTeX. The format must conform with the official ACL 2019 style templates:
Submission Website: submissions are done via softconf: https://www.softconf.com/acl2019/arabicnlp
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.
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 major overlap (50%) may lead to rejection of the paper even after an acceptance notification have gone out.
Anonymity and Supplementary Material (same as ACL 2019): As the reviewing will be blind, papers must not include authors' names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ..." must be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ..." Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.
Papers should not refer, for further detail, to documents that are not available to the reviewers. For example, do not omit or redact important citation information to preserve anonymity. Instead, use third person or named reference to this work, as described above (“Smith showed” rather than “we showed”).
Papers may be accompanied by a resource (software and/or data) described in the paper. Papers that are submitted with accompanying software/data may receive additional credit toward the overall evaluation, and the potential impact of the software and data will be taken into account when making the acceptance/rejection decisions.
WANLP 2019 also encourages the submission of supplementary material to report preprocessing decisions, model parameters, and other details necessary for the replication of the experiments reported in the paper. Seemingly small preprocessing decisions can sometimes make a large difference in performance, so it is crucial to record such decisions to precisely characterize state-of-the-art methods.
Nonetheless, supplementary material should be supplementary (rather than central) to the paper. It may include explanations or details of proofs or derivations that do not fit into the paper, lists of features or feature templates, sample inputs and outputs for a system, pseudo-code or source code, and data. The paper should not rely on the supplementary material: while the paper may refer to and cite the supplementary material and the supplementary material will be available to reviewers, they will not be asked to review or even download the supplementary material. Authors should refer to the contents of the supplementary material in the paper submission, so that reviewers interested in these supplementary details will know where to look.
Note: The supplementary material does not count towards page limit and should not be included in paper, but should be submitted separately using the appropriate field on the submission website
8:30 - 8:40: Opening remarks (Wassim El-Hajj)
8:40 - 9:30: Keynote (Ahmed Ali)
9:30 - 10:20: Session 1 - Machine Translation
10:20 – 10:30: Shared Task Overview
10:30-11:00: Coffee Break
11:00 - 12:40: Session 2 - Selected topics
12:40-2:00: Lunch
2:00 – 2:50: Session 3 - Applications Session
2:50 - 3:30: Workshop Poster Boaster (~3 min per poster )
3:30-4:00: Coffee Break
4:00 – 6:00: Poster Session (Workshop papers and shared task)
Dr. Ahmed Ali of the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) has agreed to be the keynote speaker at the workshop. He will be talking about the latest research and advances in Arabic dialect speech recognition. The speaker will cover his own expenses.
Introduction: Arabic dialect identification is the task of automatically labeling a segment of speech or text with the dialect it comes from. Most of previous work and shared tasks on dialect identification focused on regional level dialect labeling (efforts by Zaidan and Callison-Burch, Elfardy and Diab, and the VarDial ADI evaluation campaign (http://alt.qcri.org/vardial2018/index.php?id=campaign)). This new proposed shared task will be the first to target a large set of dialect labels at the city and country levels. The data for the shared task is created or collected under the Multi-Arabic Dialect Applications and Resources (MADAR) project. (MADAR Project Page: https://camel.abudhabi.nyu.edu/madar/)
Shared Task Page: https://sites.google.com/view/madar-shared-task/home
Extracted from: http://www.winlp.org/winlp-2019-workshop/poster-slides-tips/