Date: 20 April 2013,            Place:Sina Institute at Birzeit University

People who are interested to contribute to the Symposium are encouraged to submit a short abstract (300-600 words) to sina@birzeit.edu. Submissions can be research-oriented, applications and use cases, or problem specification. The best submissions will be then selected for presentation. All abstracts and presentations will be published on the website of the Symposium.

First Keynote: Translation and Localization at Google -Towards enriching the Arabic Content on the Web. Fayeq Oweis, Google.
Second Keynote: Arabic Natural Langauge Processing – Challenges and Opportunities. Nizar Habash. Columbia University.

About:

Arabic is one of the most spoken languages worldwide. Despite its old and rich culture and content, its religious and political significance, and the economical importance of its speaking communities, however little success was achieved in developing Arabic-based technologies and Arabic content on the Web. One of the main reasons is that, research in this topic was mostly conducted by non-Arabic speaking researchers –with a limited engagement of Arab researchers.

The goal of this symposium is: to encourage research on Arabic technologies and content at Palestine universities; to encourage cooperation between researchers in IT, linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive sciences, philosophy, and other disciplines; to strengthen the relationship between academia and industry for developing smart language-based applications; and to enable networking and cooperation on future project proposals.

Target Audience:

1. Researchers and students in IT-related fields.
2. Researchers and students in linguistics and psycholinguistics fields.
3. Researchers and students in Philosophy, cognitive sciences, and other related fields.
4. Companies developing or using Arabic technologies.
5. Public and private institutions using Arabic technologies or facing language-related challenges.

Topics:

We welcome presentations about ongoing research, as well as, applications and use cases related the following topics:

• Arabic and Natural Language Processing: multilingual search engines, stemming, tagging summarization, translation, generation, named-entity recognition, OCR, data mining, question answering, speech recognition, word sense disambiguation, information retrieval .
• Linguistic Resources and Corpus Engineering.
• Creating and Consuming Arabic Content on the Web.
• Social Media and Arabic Content.
• Arabic Libraries and Archives.

Scientific Committee:

• Mustafa Jarrar, Birzeit University, Palestine
• Adnan Yahya, Birzeit University
• Bassem Sayrafi, Birzeit University
• Mahdi Arar, Birzeit University
• Bilal Alshafei, Al Najah University
• Rebhi Baraka, Islamic Univerity of Gaza
• Hashem Tamimi, Palestine Polytechnic University
• Fayeq Oweis, Google
• Andrea Hawit, GSoft

Program:

08:30	Opening Session
08:45	First Session First presentation: Second presentation:
09:45	Coffee Break
10:00	Second Session First presentation: Second presentation:
11:00	Coffee Break
11:15	Third Session First presentation: Second presentation:
12:15	Lunch Break
13:15	Fourth Session First presentation: Second presentation:
14:15	Coffee Break
14:30	First Keynote Lecture
15:10	Coffee Break
15:25	Second Keynote Lecture
16:05	Closing Session