This website is the home of the CAASL workshops which were held in August 2004 (at Coling in Geneva) and July 2007 (at the LSA Linguistic Institute at Staford University).
Recent years have seen an increase in computational studies of Arabic script based languages. However, there has not been enough collaboration or communication between various research and industry groups working on the issues involving these languages. The goal of this site is to provide a forum for sharing of the tools and publications on this topic.
Computational
Approaches to Arabic Script-based Languages (or CAASL)
aims to bring together researchers working on the computer processing
of Arabic script-based languages such as Arabic, Persian (Farsi or
Dari), Pashto, Urdu and Kurdish, among others. The usage of the Arabic
script and the influence of Arabic vocabulary give rise to certain
computational issues that are common to all these languages despite
their being of distinct language families, such as right to left
direction, encoding variation, absence of capitalization, complex word
structure, and a high degree of ambiguity due to non-representation of
short vowels in the writing system.
The CAASL workshops have been held twice so far with the goal of
providing a forum for researchers from academia, industry, and
government developers, practitioners, and users to share their research
and experience. CAASL presents the participants with an opportunity to
exchange ideas, approaches and implementations of computational
systems, to highlight the common challenges faced by all practitioners,
to assess the state of the art in the field, and to identify promising
areas for future collaborative research in the development of NLP
resources and systems for Arabic script languages.
If you are interested in joining our discussion list or would like to
help in the planning of future workshops, please sign up here.