January 2009 Newsletter

New Corpora

CSLU: Numbers Version 1.3

English CTS Treebank with Structural Metadata

GALE Phase 1 Chinese Broadcast Conversation Parallel Text - Part 1 

Announcements

2nd International Conference on Arabic Resources and Tools Conference
The LDC would like to pass along the following announcement regarding the upcoming MEDAR Conference:

The second international conference on Arabic Language Resources and Tools will be held in Cairo, Egypt on April 22-23, 2009.  The conference is organized by the Mediterranean Arabic Language and Speech Technology consortium (MEDAR), a new NEMLAR initiative, and is supported by the European Commission.

Conference aims:

Language Resources (LRs) are a central component of the linguistic infrastructure, necessary for the development of HLT applications and products, and therefore for industrial development. In this conference we will focus on Arabic language technology and on the necessary language resources and tools for both research and commercial development of language technology for Arabic. Multilingual language technology is a particular focus, as well as general methodologies. The other important aspect for the promotion of Arabic language technology is cooperation. Cooperation is extremely important for the advancement of the field, be it cooperation between European, Arabic and American partners, cooperation between Arabic partners, cooperation between research and industry etc. MEDAR will present its first proposal for a Cooperation Road Map, and will seek discussion and collaboration for its final version.

The aim of this conference is to provide a forum for the discussion of the state-of-the-art for Arabic resources and tools, in particular for machine translation and multilingual information retrieval, discuss problems and opportunities, exchange information regarding LRs and tools, their applications, ongoing and planned activities, industrial uses and needs, requirements coming from the new e-society, both with respect to policy issues and to technological and organizational ones. The road map discussions will in particular bring in policy issues and collaboration and organization issues.

Important Dates:

• Submission of proposals for papers, posters, referenced demos: January 30, 2009
• Notification of acceptance: March 9, 2009
• Final versions for the proceedings: April 6, 2009

For Further Information:

Bente Maegaard (Coordinator)
Tel: + 45 35 32 90 90
Fax: + 45 35 32 90 89
Email: nemlar[AT]hum.ku.dk
Web: www.medar.info