The Machine Translation SIG of the British Computer Society requests papers for presentation at a one day Conference in London, UK, on Monday 23 October 2006 on the subject of the challenge of the Arabic language for Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation in particular. This includes a wide range of possible topics such as electronic dictionaries and corpus linguistics.
 
The Conference will be held in the excellent meeting facilities of the British Computer Society in central London.
 
If you would like to present a paper please could you submit a 200-400 word abstract of your proposed paper by 15 July. Please send them to me wiggjd@bcs.org.uk, with copies to r.mitkov@wlv.ac.uk and d.r.lewis@exeter.ac.uk. The Conference language will be English.
 
We will accept or reject the abstract by the 15 August. After acceptance we would require your paper to be supplied in hardcopy and electronic form (MS Word only with Arabic capability) by 15 September for inclusion in the Proceedings which will be published under the auspices of the British Computer Society.
 
We are looking for papers to be delivered in 30 to 40 minutes with each being followed immediately by 5 to 10 minutes of question and answer time.
 
Facilities are available for the display of computer information for illustration purposes during the presentation.
 
We will also be able to provide separate facilities for the demonstration of software without the presentation of a paper.
 
We have tentatively divided up the day under the following headings, but this is flexible:

Morning

(i) Introduction: talks on the Arabic language
(ii) The challenges of Arabic for language processing

Afternoon

(iii) Concrete applications I: NLP tasks and applications for Arabic
(iv) Concrete applications II: MT between English and Arabic in focus