MEDAR : Arabic language technology, state-of-the-art and a cooperation roadmap

Abstract

After the successful completion of the NEMLAR project 2003-2005, a new opportunity was opened by the European Commission, and largely the same partners are now executing the MEDAR project. The project has three streams of activity: the technical stream, the cooperation stream and the dissemination stream. MEDAR has updated the existing surveys and BLARK for Arabic, and now the technical stream is focusing on machine translation and information retrieval. The cooperation stream takes as its two most important activities to reinforce and extend the NEMLAR network and to create a cooperation roadmap for Human Language Technologies for Arabic. At this conference we can now present the first version of the cooperation roadmap, and we hope it will provoke fruitful discussion at the conference and written feedback on the website, so that over time it can help create a larger platform for collaborative projects. Finally, the third stream of project focuses on dissemination; this happens through newsletter, website and in particular the present international conference. The goal of these activities is to create a lasting collaboration between EU countries and Arabic speaking countries, and also to extend this collaboration to all persons and institutions who share the goal of promoting Arabic language technology in a collaborative framework.