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MEDAR
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MEDiterranean ARabic language
and speech technology.
Among a consortium of 15
reputable academic and industrial partners from 12 European and
Arabic countries, RDI launched in Feb. 2008 this 30-month
project that comes under the seventh Framework Programme (FP7)
of the European Commission's Community Research. Sharing in this
project comes after the remarkably successful Euro-Mediterranean
30-month NEMLAR project
where RDI played a major role towards its achievement.
MEDAR
addresses International Cooperation with the Arabic region on
Speech and Language Technologies. MEDAR is structured around 3
pillars, 4 main objectives, and a number of instruments. The 3
pillars are:
1) Producing a knowledge base on Human Language Technology (HLT)
players, existing language resources (LRs) and processing tools,
activities and products for Arabic.
MEDAR survey results.
2) Designing a strong cooperation roadmap between the EU and
Arabic countries, within the Arabic countries, and between
academia and industry.
MEDAR roadmap.
3) Focusing on Machine Translation (MT) and Multilingual
Information Retrieval (MLIR) for which required technology
components, LRs, and benchmarking methodologies will be
identified.
MEDAR workplan.
The 4 objectives are:
1) Consolidating the NEMLAR network of players in all areas of
HLT.
NEMLAR network.
2) Developing the Cooperation Roadmap based on a clear picture
of the foreseeable technological trends, market potentials, and
cooperation possibilities.
MEDAR roadmap.
3) Updating the Basic Language Resource Kit: the minimum set of
resources and tools necessary for carrying out research and
training on LRs and HLT, with a focus on MT and MLIR.
MEDAR's Arabic BLARK.
4) Supporting the development of tools and resources, in
particular MT and MLIR on the basis of partners technologies and
open source code (e.g. Statistical MT, MLIR, and speech
recognition) and the framework for their benchmarking.
MEDAR workplan.
A variety of instruments is used to achieve the objectives:
Surveys
are conducted as well as market analysis. Partners'
background is exploited to identify the best multilingual opensource tools to customize to Arabic. Expertise on evaluation
within the consortium creates the right benchmarking
framework. Key achievements are highlighted for each
strategic partnership in addition to the actions to be taken.
Human resources is at the heart of our recommendations.
Information is disseminated through e.g. website and
e-newsletter, and a major conference on LRs, tools, and
Evaluation for Arabic.
RDI team has successfully undertaken the local organization part
of the
2nd International Conference on Arabic Language Resources &
Tools held in Grand Hyatt hotel in Cairo from Apr.
21st to Apr. 23rd as the biggest 2009 event devoted to Arabic
Human Language Technologies. With the help of the other 14
partners in the MEDAR consortium, this
international conference and its pre- conference tutorials
made a great success for the whole growing field of Arabic NLP/HLT.
To join the MEDAR network, press
here.
For more info on this project, download...
(PDF, 66 KB)
(PDF, 175 KB)
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