CALL FOR PAPERS

Arabic natural language processing (NLP) is a challenging field of research. This is due to many factors including Arabic’s complex and rich morphology, its high degree of ambiguity as well as the presence of a number of dialects that vary quite widely.  Furthermore, Arabic has many important geopolitical connections and 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 15 years in the area of Arabic NLP.  This special edition of TAL intends to provide a forum for researchers to share and discuss their work. We invite submissions on topics that include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Basic core technologies: morphological analysis, disambiguation, tokenization, POS tagging, named entity detection, chunking, parsing, semantic role labeling, sentiment analysis, Arabic dialect modeling, etc.

• Applications: machine translation, speech recognition, speech synthesis, optical character recognition, question answering, pedagogy, assistive technologies, social media, text analytics, etc.

• Resources: dictionaries, annotated data, corpus, etc.

• Theoretical papers with specific relevance to natural language processing.

Submissions must  include finished unpublished work.  Submissions must have a clear focus on specific issues pertaining to the Arabic language whether it is standard Arabic, dialectal, or mixed. Additionally, submissions on efforts using Arabic resources but targeting other languages are also welcome.

For this issue, the journal TAL proposes a special process of “mentoring” for the authors who want it. The “mentoring” is meant to help authors for the redaction of their article (in French or English), without interfering with their scientific content. Candidates for this mentoring process are asked to submit their article earlier (see “deadlines”).