From lingua at geez.org Mon Sep 22 14:03:01 2008 From: lingua at geez.org (Daniel Yacob) Date: Tue Sep 23 08:28:44 2008 Subject: [am-nlp] Obituary - M. Lionel Bender Message-ID: Greetings All, I was bouncing around the net recently and was shocked to come into an obituary for Lionel Bender: http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/19/19-633.html#1 Regrettably I've learned of his passing more than half a year after the fact; so I thought to pass the news on to others here who likewise may not be aware. Lionel Bender is likely best known people here for his pivotal work with Hailu Fulas in "Amharic Verb Morphology: A Generative Approach" which is referenced in many Amharic NLP papers -lets hope that he may have read at least a few. sincerely, -Daniel From lingua at geez.org Mon Sep 22 14:05:44 2008 From: lingua at geez.org (Daniel Yacob) Date: Tue Sep 23 08:28:46 2008 Subject: [am-nlp] Any Amharic NLP Papers this Year? Message-ID: Greetings All, This is a simple belated "Happy Ethiopian New Year" wish along with a request to review the papers listed under the Amharic NLP website, starting from: http://nlp.amharic.org/research/papers/by-year/ Please check that papers of previous years are listed and if you are aware of any published or presented in 2008 please let people know! The *only* new NLP paper that I'm aware of for Ethiopian languages in 2008 is Dr Gasser's excellent Tigrinya FST paper -available under the Amharic NLP site under a new "Related Languages" area: http://nlp.amharic.org/research/related-languages/ To submit new papers please send the bibliographic listing offline to either Samuel Eyassu or myself. Documents that are not online can also be hosted at NLP.Amharic.Org when the author(s) grant the right to do so. People wishing to add more than a few papers are also welcome to site editor rights whereby you would be able to make additions directly. cheers, -Daniel From gasser at cs.indiana.edu Sun Sep 28 17:40:11 2008 From: gasser at cs.indiana.edu (Michael Gasser) Date: Mon Sep 29 03:03:11 2008 Subject: [am-nlp] Call for papers: Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages Message-ID: Hello everybody. Let's hope there will be a number of submissions on Ethio-Semitic languages at the Semitic workshop next year. Mike ------------------------------------------------------------------ Michael Gasser | www.cs.indiana.edu/~gasser | gasser @ indiana.edu Associate Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA Off: +1 812 855-7078 Cell: +1 812 272-0958 Skype: megasser ------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 17:09:09 +0300 From: Shuly Wintner To: Wintner Shuly Cc: Mike Rosner Subject: [Semitic] Call for papers: Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages EACL-2009 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages Co-located with The 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Athens, Greece, either Tuesday, March 31st, or Monday, March 30th, 2009 http://staff.um.edu.mt/mros1/casl09/ Topic: The Semitic family includes many languages and dialects spoken by a large number of native speakers (around 300 million). However, Semitic languages as a whole are still understudied. The most prominent members of this family are Arabic (and its dialects), Hebrew, Amharic, Aramaic, Maltese and Syriac. Their shared ancestry is apparent through pervasive cognate sharing, a rich and productive pattern-based morphology, and similar syntactic constructions. An increasing body of computational linguistics work is starting to appear for both Arabic and Hebrew. Arabic alone, as the largest member of the Semitic family, has been receiving much attention lately via dedicated projects such as MEDAR, as well as workshops and conferences. These include, among others, the Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (ACL 2001, Toulouse, France), the workshop on Arabic Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2002, Las Palmas, Canary Islands), a special session on Arabic processing in Traitement Automatique du Langage Naturel (TALN 2004, Fes, Morocco), the NEMLAR Arabic Language Resources and Tools Conference (2004, Cairo, Egypt), The Challenge of Arabic for NLP/MT (October 2006, London, U.K.), and the series of workshops on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages (ACL 1998, Montreal, Canada; ACL 2005, Ann Arbor, USA; and ACL 2007, Prague, Czech Republic) . The increase in attention to Arabic has been coupled with a surge in computational resources for this language, made available to the community by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and by the European Language Resources Association (ELRA/ELDA). Tools and resources for other Semitic languages are being created at a slower rate. While corpora and some tools are necessarily language-specific, ideally there should be more cross-fertilization among research and development efforts for different Semitic languages. The workshop will be an opportunity for the Special Interest Group on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages (the SIG) to meet and discuss future direction in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing approaches to Semitic Languages. Submission: We invite submissions on all Semitic languages, including work describing recent state-of-the-art NLP systems and work leveraging resource and tool creation for the Semitic language family. We especially welcome submissions on work that crosses individual language boundaries, heightens awareness amongst Semitic-language researchers of shared challenges and breakthroughs, and highlights issues and solutions common to all Semitic languages. Papers should describe original work; they should emphasize completed work rather than intended work, and should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results. A paper accepted for presentation at the Workshop cannot be presented or have been presented at any other meeting with publicly available published proceedings. Papers that are being submitted to other conferences or workshops must indicate this on the submission page. Reviewing of papers will be double-blind, and all submissions will receive three independent reviews. Final decisions on the program will be made by the Program Committee. Submissions will be assessed with respect to appropriateness, clarity, soundness/correctness, meaningful comparison, originality/innovativeness, and impact of ideas or results. All papers that are accepted will be published in the proceedings of the Workshop, and will be presented as a poster or an oral presentation. At least one author of each accepted paper is expected to attend the Workshop and present the paper. The language of the Workshop is English. Submission will be electronic, via a web-service to be annoaunced later. Please consult the Workshop web page for more details: http://staff.um.edu.mt/mros1/casl09/ Important dates: Dec 19, 2008 Deadline for paper submission Jan 30, 2009 Notification of acceptance of papers Feb 13, 2009 Camera-ready copies due Mar 30-31, 2009 EACL 2009 workshops Organizers: Mike Rosner, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Malta, Malta Shuly Wintner, Department of Computer Science, University of Haifa, Israel Program Committee: Ann Bies (LDC/University of Pennsylvania, USA) Tim Buckwalter (LDC/University of Pennsylvania, USA) Violetta Cavalli-Sforza (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) Mona Diab (Columbia University, USA) Joseph Dichy (University of Lyon 2, France) Michael Elhadad (Ben Gurion University, Israel) Martha W. Evens (Illinois Institute of Technology, USA) Ray Fabri (University of Malta) Ali Farghaly (Oracle, USA) Andrew Freeman (Washington University, USA) Albert Gatt (University of Aberdeen, UK) Gregory Grefenstette, (LIC2M/CEA-LIST France) Nizar Habash (Columbia University, USA) Alon Itai (Technion/Israel Institute of Technology, Israel) Steven Krauwer (Utrecht University, Netherlands) Mohamed Maamouri (LDC, University of Pennsylvania USA) Bente Maegaard (CST, University of Copenhagen, Denmark) Nurit Melnik (Oranim College, Israel) Uzzi Ornan (Technion, Israel) Owen Rambow (Columbia University, USA) Mike Rosner (University of Malta, Malta) co-chair Paolo Rosso (Universidad Politecnica Valencia, Spain) Khalil Sima'an (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) Abdelhadi Soudi (Ecole Nationale de l'Industrie Minerale, Morocco) Adam Ussishkin (University of Arizona, USA) Shuly Wintner (University of Haifa, Israel) co-chair Imed Zitouni (IBM Research, USA) _______________________________________________ Semitic mailing list Semitic@cs.haifa.ac.il https://cs.haifa.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/semitic