MOTIVATION:
Due to the
successful organization and excellent feedback obtained during the special session
on Arabic Natural Language Processing: Algorithms,
Resources, Tools, Techniques and Applications, in conjunction with the First International Conference on
Communications, Signal Processing, and their Applications (ICCSPA’13), February
2013, Sharjah, UAE, we would like to extend this initiative and propose a
special issue on the same topic in a relevant high quality journal such as The International
Journal of Speech Technology (IJST). The accepted papers of this special
session were indexed in the IEEEXplore database. This special session was
mainly organized by The University of Jordan, The American University of
Sharjah, and University of Leeds.
AIMS AND SCOPE:
Arabic language is the largest Semitic language that
is still in existence, one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, and
one of the six official languages of the United Nations (UN). Traditionally, most
research in the field of speech technology has been conducted in very few
languages such as English, French, Spanish or Chinese. Recently, many
researchers from Arab world and worldwide have been interested in Arabic
Natural Language Processing (NLP). Several improvements have been achieved for
various language processing components (e.g. morphological analysis,
parsing, named entities recognition, audio transcription, acoustic model,
language model, phonetic dictionaries, continuous speech recognition, etc), which
involved Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and Colloquial Arabic.
We invite submissions for this special issue on Arabic Natural Language Processing and Speech Recognition: Algorithms,
Resources, Tools, Techniques and Applications, as part of the International Journal of Speech Technology (IJST). The
focus of this special issue is to provide an overview of the
state-of-the-art, explore new directions and emerging trends, exchange
information regarding Arabic language processing and their applications, and evaluate
methodologies, tools, ongoing and
planned activities. Algorithms, resources, technologies and applications for
processing text, speech and multimodalities are encouraged. In addition, papers
integrating speech and/or multimodal with written resources are welcomed. The
aim of this special issue is to bring together researchers with a generic
interest on Arabic NLP to raise awareness of different perspectives and
practices, and to identify some common themes.
We therefore
welcome submissions on a range of topics of interest, including but not limited
to:
·
Guidelines, standards, best practices and models for Arabic NLP
interoperability.
·
Methodologies
and tools for annotating Arabic NLP resources.
·
Methodologies
and tools for the extraction and acquisition of knowledge.
·
Issues
in, and evaluation of, morphological analysers, PoS taggers, and parsers.
·
Issues
in, and evaluation of, machine translation.
·
Text-mining,
stylometry, and authorship attribution.
·
Corpus
query languages and tools.
·
Dictionaries,
thesauri, WordNet, ontologies, and knowledge representation.
·
Multimodality
·
Text
analytics for religious text
·
Sentiment
Analysis
·
Arabic
speech recognition and understanding.
·
Arabic
acoustic and language models.
·
Arabic
phonetic dictionaries and transcriptions.
·
Arabic
Speech Synthesis.
·
Emotion
recognition using Arabic speech and/or multimodal biometrics.
·
Speaker
recognition and verification using Arabic speech and/or multimodal biometrics.
·
Arabic
language resources and corpora (spoken, written, etc), and tools.
·
Arabic
speech paralinguistic.
·
Integration
between (multilingual) LRs, ontologies and Semantic Web technologies.
·
Integration
between (multilingual) LRs and multimedia technologies.
·
Metadata
descriptions of LRs and metadata for semantic/content markup.
PAPER
SUBMISSION:
The special issue
solicits original, unpublished, and high-quality research papers. The authors
are invited to submit their contributions formatted as IJST standards. All
submitted papers will be refereed by at least three reviewers for quality,
correctness, originality, and relevance. All accepted papers will be published
in the IJST volumes. Authors are kindly required to follow the IJST submission procedure
with an email notification to the special issue guest editor (m.abushariah@ju.edu.jo)
including the paper ID and the paper title.
IMPORTANT DATES:
·
Submission
of Full Papers: 1 March 2015
·
Notification
of Decision: 15 April 2015
·
Deadline
for Resubmission: 15 May 2015
·
Final
Decision: 15 June 2015
·
Special
Issue Publication Date: September 2015
GUEST EDITOR:
Dr.
Mohammad A. M. Abushariah,
Computer
Information Systems Department, King Abdullah II School for Information
Technology, The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan.
E-mail: m.abushariah@ju.edu.jo
CO-EDITORS:
Dr.
Amy Neustein,
Editor-in-Chief,
International Journal of Speech Technology, Springer.
E-mail: amy.neustein@verizon.net
Dr.
Bassam H. Hammo,
Computer
Information Systems Department, King Abdullah II School for Information
Technology, The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan.
E-mail: b.hammo@ju.edu.jo