Description

Workshop on Arabic Dialect Technologies

Description

The First Workshop on Arabic Dialect Technologies brings together the top researchers and rising graduate student stars working in this area from across the Arab World, Europe, and the United States.The workshop follows the format of those organized at Dagstuhl in Germany. There are no paper submissions or publications. However, the workshop will consist in various discussions and some presentation of previous and ongoing work. The workshop is primarily about community building and identifying the goals and directions of the field of Arabic dialect technologies. We plan to subsequently write a report (jointly authored) on the issues discussed and the workshop conclusions.

The participants will present their ongoing research, discuss in focus groups the challenges facing this research area, and work to co-develop a research vision and roadmap that fosters collaboration and resource sharing. The following are some of the topics that we will discuss in the workshop:

• Collection and creation of Dialectal Arabic corpora
• Standards for Dialectal Arabic annotation and orthography
• Adaptation of Standard Arabic and (other) Dialectal Arabic resources and tools
• Dialect identification and classification
• Specific enabling technologies: lexicons, morphology analysis, syntax parsing, etc.
• Specific applications: speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation, etc.
• Arabic Dialect technology and digital humanities, language education, etc.

The goals of this workshop are:

• To bring together renowned scholars from a number of institutions around the world for an interdisciplinary discussion on the state-of-the-art in the modelling and analysis of Arabic dialects.
• To identify the challenges and opportunities that exist in the study of Arabic dialects.
• To co-formulate a roadmap for future research and collaboration.
• To develop a worldwide network of researchers in Arabic and Arabic dialect technologies.
• To bridge the gap between research on Arabic dialects in linguistics and computer science.
• To contribute to the formation of the next generation of researchers in computational linguistics.

Organizers

• Nizar Habash, New York University Abu Dhabi
• Houda Bouamor, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar

Sponsors

• New York University Abu Dhabi Institute