This project supports a U.S.-Morocco Workshop: Language Technology Research and Education Program, March 2006, Rabat, Morocco. The US organizer is Dr. Gregory Monaco, Department of Psychology, Kansas State University, Manhattan and Director for Research and Education, Great Plains Network (GPN) and Dr. Abdelhadi Soudi, Center for Languages, Communication and Computer Science, Ecole Nationale de L'Industrie Minerale (ENIM), Rabat, Morocco. The workshop's research goals are to enable participating faculty and students to familiarize themselves with research problems currently being tackled, and with research expertise, to identify a common set of research problems related to the processing of English, Arabic, and Berber, to make plans to develop Human Language Technology (HLT) applications, and to prioritize and develop partnerships to tackle the set of problems. The educational goals are to enable participants to identify methodologies for effective teaching of Natural Language Processing to a diverse audience, consisting of a mix of students in various disciplines and with a wide range of experiences, to identify potential contributory components (courses) from each university towards a joint degree in HLT, to identify needed courses to complete a program in HLT, and to develop a plan for implementing the joint HLT curriculum.
The proposed workshop fits into a larger plan to create a vibrant research and education collaboration between institutions of higher education in the two countries. There is a pressing need in the US for help with Arabic language resources and new approaches to making the processing of Arabic speech more adequate. The Great Plains Network, with its strengths in dissemination and distance learning, will bring in a range of participants, including linguists, anthropologists, and computational experts. The workshop will cultivate and strengthen working relationships between US/GPN and Moroccan researchers and increase cross-cultural awareness and sensitivity. Working relationships developed among graduate students from both countries will assure that the effort is propagated beyond the initial institutions involved. Longer-term outcomes of the workshop include educational exchange, interdisciplinary, cross-cultural training of Human Language Technology graduate students, and workforce development. Additional impacts of the resulting joint research program are likely to be both cultural and economic by assisting in safeguarding linguistic and cultural diversity, by strengthening the position of Arabic and other local dialects in linguistics and language technology, by easing entry of US companies into the Moroccan market and vice versa, by providing the basis for automatic translation tools for documentation and marketing material.
