Successful Research Year for CAMeL

Researchers and students in the Computational Approaches to Modeling Language lab (CAMeL) at New York University Abu Dhabi have so far published 20 papers in 2018 at top conferences and workshops in the field of computational linguistics and natural language processing.  The conferences include LREC 2018 (Miyazaki, Japan), NAACL 2018 (New Orleans, USA), ACL 2018 & SIGDIAL 2018 (Melbourne, Australia),  COLING 2018 (Santa Fe, USA) and EMNLP 2018 (Brussels, Belgium).  Some of the publications were in collaboration with researchers from over a dozen international institutes including Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, University of Bahrain, American University of Beirut, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Al Akhawayn University and Université Paris Sorbonne.

The CAMeL Lab research areas include developing new artificial intelligence algorithms for language processing, creating resources and tools to support research in computational linguistics, as well as creating new annotation standards and guidelines with a biased focus towards the Arabic language and its dialects.

Publications by Theme

Dialectal Arabic Modeling

• The MADAR Arabic Dialect Corpus and Lexicon by Houda Bouamor, Nizar Habash, Mohammad Salameh, Wajdi Zaghouani, Owen Rambow, Dana Abdulrahim, Ossama Obeid, Salam Khalifa, Fadhl Eryani, Alexander Erdmann and Kemal Oflazer. (LREC 2018).

• Unified Guidelines and Resources for Arabic Dialect Orthography by Nizar Habash, Fadhl Eryani, Salam Khalifa, Owen Rambow, Dana Abdulrahim, Alexander Erdmann, Reem Faraj, Wajdi Zaghouani, Houda Bouamor, Nasser Zalmout, Sara Hassan, Faisal Al Shargi, Sakhar Alkhereyf, Basma Abdulkareem, Ramy Eskander, Mohammad Salameh and Hind Saddiki. (LREC 2018).

• Addressing Noise in Multidialectal Word Embeddings by Alexander Erdmann, Nasser Zalmout and Nizar Habash. (ACL 2018).

• Fine-Grained Arabic Dialect Identification by Mohammad Salameh, Houda Bouamor and Nizar Habash. (COLING 2018).

Morphological Modeling

• Complementary Strategies for Low Resourced Morphological Modeling by Alexander Erdmann and Nizar Habash. (SIGMORPHON 2018 co-located with EMNLP 2018).

• An Arabic Morphological Analyzer and Generator with Copious Features by Dima Taji, Salam Khalifa, Ossama Obeid, Fadhl Eryani and Nizar Habash. (SIGMORPHON 2018 co-located with EMNLP 2018).
  

Morphological Disambiguation

• Noise-Robust Morphological Disambiguation for Dialectal Arabic by Nasser Zalmout, Alexander Erdmann, and Nizar Habash. (NAACL 2018).

• A Morphologically Annotated Corpus of Emirati Arabic by Salam Khalifa, Nizar Habash, Fadhl Eryani, Ossama Obeid, Dana Abdulrahim and Meera Al Kaabi. (LREC 2018).

• MADARi: A Web Interface for Joint Arabic Morphological Annotation and Spelling Correction by Ossama Obeid, Salam Khalifa, Nizar Habash, Houda Bouamor, Wajdi Zaghouani and Kemal Oflazer. (LREC 2018).

Syntactic Parsing

• An Arabic Dependency Treebank in the Travel Domain by Dima Taji, Jamila El Gizuli and Nizar Habash. (OSACT 2018, co-located with LREC 2018).

• Palmyra: A Platform Independent Dependency Annotation Tool for Morphologically Rich Languages by Talha Javed, Nizar Habash and Dima Taji. (LREC 2018).

• CONLL-UL Universal Morphological Lattices for Universal Dependency Parsing by Amir More, Özlem Çetinoğlu, Nizar Habash, Benoît Sagot, Djamé Seddah, Reut Tsarfaty, Dima Taji and Çağrı Çöltekin. (LREC 2018).

• Improving Domain Independent Question Parsing with Synthetic Treebanks by Halim-Antoine Boukaram, Nizar Habash, Micheline Ziadee and Majd Sakr. (LAW-MWE-CxG-2018 co-located with COLING 2018).

Readability Modeling

• A Leveled Reading Corpus of Modern Standard Arabic by Muhamed Al Khalil, Hind Saddiki, Nizar Habash and Latifa Alfalasi. (LREC 2018).

• Feature Optimization for Predicting Readability of Arabic L1 and L2 by Hind Saddiki, Nizar Habash, Violetta Cavalli-Sforza and Muhamed Al Khalil. (NLPTEA 2018 co-located with ACL 2018).

Machine Translation

• A Parallel Corpus of Arabic-Japanese News Articles by Go Inoue, Nizar Habash, Yuji Matsumoto and Hiroyuki Aoyama. (LREC 2018).

• A Cross-lingual Messenger with Keyword Searchable Phrases for the Travel Domain by Shehroze Khan, Jihyun Kim, Tarik Zulfikarpasic, Peter Chen and Nizar Habash. (COLING 2018).

Dialogue Systems

• A Bilingual Interactive Human Avatar Dialogue System by Dana Abu Ali, Muaz Ahmad, Hayat Al Hassan, Paula Dozsa, Ming Hu, Jose Varias and Nizar Habash. (SIGDIAL 2018).

Automatic Spelling Correction

• Utilizing Character and Word Embeddings for Text Normalization with Sequence-to-Sequence Models by Daniel Watson, Nasser Zalmout and Nizar Habash. (EMNLP 2018).

Sentiment Analysis

• ArSEL: A Large Scale Arabic Sentiment and Emotion Lexicon by Gilbert Badaro, Hussein Jundi, Hazem Hajj, Wassim El-Hajj and Nizar Habash. (OSACT 2018 co-located with LREC 2018).