Title: Digital Preservation of Arabic between Linguistics and AI
Abstract: Languages are one of the oldest studied disciplines as they are intimately linked to the existence of human beings. The study of languages is a multidisciplinary field which has attracted the interest of several related fields such as linguistics and NLP, each providing additional knowledge for language understanding, learning, evolution, or preservation.
From the technological point of view, computer science in general and artificial intelligence in particular study languages through natural language processing techniques, where the main goal is to discover linguistic patterns from corpora without resorting to linguists at all in many cases. Research in this field is diverse and currently benefits from advances in machine learning and deep learning techniques. One of the less studied aspects is the use and exploitation of these techniques for language preservation needs, for language comprehension needs or for the explanation of linguistic phenomena.
The objective of this talk is to emphasize this perspective and to show through concrete cases how through the exploitation of several old and new computer and AI techniques, we can advance the digital preservation of Arabic and the explanation of some linguistic properties.
Short Biography: Karim Bouzoubaa is a Professor of computer science at the Mohammadia School of Engineers at the Mohammed 5th University of Rabat. Prof. Bouzoubaa holds a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. from Laval University in Canada in Artificial Intelligence and multi-agent systems fields. He is a research-driven professional with a distinctive combination of leadership, research & development, and education in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. He contributed to the release of the Amine platform for the development of intelligent systems. He has published two books and over a hundred papers in top-ranked conferences and journals, taught at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and worked on various R&D projects. He is the founding president of the Arabic Language Engineering Society in Morocco and the director of the Language Engineering lab. His research interests include Arabic NLP, NLP frameworks, Linguistic Resources and ontologies, IR and QA systems, Dialect processing, and Cognitive systems.