The EMNLP 2014 Workshop on Arabic natural language processing

Abstract

There has been a lot of progress in the last 15 years in the area of Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP). In particular, the TIDES, GALE, and BOLT programs provided a significant boost to Arabic NLP, both in generating new language and speech resources on a large scale, and in advancing the stateof-the-art in morphological processing, parsing, named entity recognition, information retrieval, speech recognition, and machine translation. The substantial investment done through these projects reflect the fact that the Middle East continues to grow in its political and economic importance. We also observe that countries in the Middle East invest substantially into higher education and into building an ecosystem, which fosters new research initiatives. This creates the hope that our own research field, NLP, and especially Arabic NLP will continue to grow, will continue to attract students both in the region and in top international universities, and that new job opportunities will open up not only in the well established language service providers, but also through start-ups offering innovative solutions