OSACT 2014 - Workshop on Free/Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Corpora Processing Tools

For Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Linguistics (CL) communities, it was a known situation that Arabic is a resource poor language. This situation was thought to be the reason why there is a lack of corpus based studies in Arabic. However, the last years witnessed the emergence of new considerably free Arabic corpora and in lesser extent Arabic corpora processing tools.
Freely available Arabic corpora can be divided into two groups. The first group contains large Arabic corpora, which are designed and constructed basically for Arabic linguistics research and activities, and maybe for Arabic NLP. These corpora are diverse in the genres they cover and their sizes range from one million words to 700 million words. The second group contains corpora that were designed basically for Arabic text classification and clustering, they mainly contain newspapers' articles. They range from less than 1 million words to 11 million words.
Some Arabic corpora are available on the web to explore using different tools, basically large corpora, while other corpora are only available for download. For the corpora that are available for download, the user may need to use standalone corpus processing tools. These tools contain many functionality such as word frequency, concordance, collocation, etc. Therefore, with the availability of large and diverse Arabic corpora, the situation does not change. There is still a lack of Arabic corpus base studies. Is this because of representativeness of these corpora? The available functions and tools associated with these corpora? or is it because they are not well known enough for the Arabic linguistics community?
MOTIVATION AND TOPICS OF INTEREST
This half-day-workshop aims to encourage the researchers and developers to foster the utilization of freely available Arabic corpora and open source Arabic corpora processing tools and help in highlighting the drawbacks of these resources and discuss techniques and approaches on how to improve them. The workshop topics include but not limited to:
Surveying and criticizing the design of freely available Arabic corpora, their associated tools and stand alone Arabic corpora processing tools.
The applications and uses of freely available Arabic language resources in fields such as Arabic language education e.g. L1 and L2.
Arabic language modeling.
Corpus based Arabic lexigraphy.
Lexical semantics and word sense.
Corpus based Arabic syntactic.
Corpus based Arabic morphology.
Development of Arabic mobile applications based on the available Arabic language resources.
Evaluation and assessment of Arabic Corpora and Corpora Processing Tools.
Future directions of Free/Open Arabic Corpora and Corpora Processing Tools.