Keynote Speakers

Keynote Speaker 1

Prof. Mohsen A. A. Rashwan

Quran and Arabic Language Technologies: Current situations and Hopes

Human Language Technologies (HLT) are the backbone of the advances that the humanity is gaining day after day. HLT include technologies for text like Information Retrieval, Text Mining, Machine Translation, Parsing, Diacritization, Summarization, Plaigirism Detection and Automatic Correction for Text Answers. HLT includes also Speech Technologies like Computer Aided Language Pronounciation to automatically train people to correctly pronounce a new language or most important how to recite the Holy Quran. Speech Technologies include also Speech Recognition and Text To Speech. Optical Character Recognition is one of the very important applications to help people to automatically digitize their scanned documents.

Arabic language nature: the Arabic language is a very flexible and beatuful language compared to many other languages. Because of its fantastic flexibily, Arabic language needs more efforts to be understood by the computer. That will need a lot of what is called Language Resources (that include general and specialized thesauri and annotated corpora). It also needs to adapt many of the available mathematical models developed for natural languages to fit the special features and the nature of the Arabic language. Also we need to decide what to do with the many dialictical challenges of the language.

For sure there are many excellent efforts here and there, but still these efforts are scattered and are not to the level of the challenges nore close to what have been done to many other languages like English French…etc. Until now there is no a road map for what to do and what are the priorities for what should be done.

Biography:

Prof. Rashwan received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electronics and electrical communications from the Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt, another M.Sc. degree in systems and computer engineering from Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada, and the Ph.D. degree in electronics and electrical communications from Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada. He currently serves as a Professor in the Department of Electronics and Electrical Communications, Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt, and as the Managing Director of RDI Corporation (www.RDI-Eg.com) that he cofounded in 1993. Over the past 25 years, he has been pursuing and leading R&D projects that focus on basic research as well as building commercial products of Arabic NLP, digital speech processing, image processing, OCR, and e-learning. Among other several national and international mega projects, he has served as a Senior Scientist in the EC’s FP7 projects on Arabic HLT NEMLAR and MEDAR, and as a Co-PI in the Egyptian Data Mining and Computer Modeling Center of Excellence (DMCM-CoE). Prof. Rashwan has cofounded ALTEC (an NGO to serve the Arabic language Technologies specially the Language resources: www.ALTEC-Center.org)