From lingua at geez.org Fri Nov 18 17:19:02 2005 From: lingua at geez.org (Daniel Yacob) Date: Fri Nov 18 17:19:10 2005 Subject: [am-nlp] NLP.Amharic.Org Message-ID: Greetings All, During this past year I've been fortunate to meet in person almost everyone on this email list. There has been a consensus opinion that the useful information and resources for working on NLP topics for Amharic are scattered and not readily found. In particular it has been noted that a problem facing a new student starting into Amharic NLP research is uncovering what work has already been conducted so that an unexplored area can be chosen for a thesis topic. While search engines like Google are an invaluable investigative tool, wading through the non-useful information becomes laborious. In the month of October and through November I've been working with Samuel Eyassu and Sisay Fissaha to set up the http://NLP.Amharic.Org site which is intended to alleviate the problems identified above. At this time the information that you will find at the website is mostly demonstrative, it shows what kinds of information and resources can be brought together and how they can be simply organized. To realize the information sharing potential of an Amharic NLP information portal will require the participation of everyone. Here are some simple things we ask everyone to do to help develop the web presence of our community of interests: 1) Create a user account at the site, click around the site and report if you experience any unexpected errors. 2) Add your research papers to the site. Review the research papers already cataloged, report corrections if needed. If a link to your paper uses a non-authoritative URL, please correct. If you do not have a permanent web address for your paper, it can be added under nlp.amharic.org . Consider adding your unpublished work and even full thesis. Send new research links, corrections and files to Samuel Eyassu. 3) Share your bookmarks! Do you have a collection of bookmarks that are useful for working on Amharic NLP? Or NLP in general? Mail them to Daniel Yacob and he will add them under the "Resources" section. 4) Planning or attending a conference on Amharic topics? Do you have some news to announce? Please submit them to Daniel for inclusion under the "News" or "Events" section. 5) Miscellaneous topics of discussion can be added to the site "wiki". The wiki is open for all members to write to, Sisay Fissaha will be managing the wiki and can help with adding information. The NLP Wiki is shared with the sister sites on "Corpora" and "Linguistics". 6) Suggest any other ideas. Consider this *your* website and an opportunity to promote your projects and let others know what you're up to and how to find you. If you have a lot of content that you would like to add, let me know and I can set your account access to allow you to add to specific areas at will. There are a family of sites under Amharic.Org, only the NLP site has any content added to it. I would like to fix any bugs that have people encountered by the end of November and then we can start to contact linguists to add lingua.amharic.org and so on. I will begin adding my corpora holdings to the corpora site in December. Concerning the Wiki, I've started a manual page for the "g2" program. In the course of writing the manual I had to rediscover all of the command line options, there are very many but most are rarely used. Some did not quite work as advertised in the draft manual and I'll update g2 to work as intended, hopefully complete within a week. When you see a download for g2 in the wiki, the manual will then also be complete. thank you, /Daniel