Mission

The development of language resources and tools for the Arabic language is important for the economy in the Arab countries; but at the same time it is important for the culture. By focusing on Arabic language technology and making both the technology and content available in Arabic, the use of Arabic will grow and the request for foreign language information will decrease.

At the same time language technology can help access information in foreign languages, even without a very good knowledge of these languages. And finally, it can help spread Arabic ideas and culture to non-Arabic languages.

The NEMLAR project, 2003-2005, was funded by the European Commission with the goal of creating a cooperation between European actors and actors in the Mediterranean region.

The goals of the NEMLAR project was the production and availability of shareable LRs and tools, the advancement of Arabic language technology, and collaboration between countries.

The MEDAR project

MEDAR addresses International Cooperation between the EU and the Mediterranean region on Speech and Language Technologies for Arabic.

The 3 pillars are:

1) producing a knowledge base on Human Language Technology (HLT)

2) designing a strong cooperation roadmap

3) focusing on Machine Translation (MT) and Multilingual Information Retrieval (MLIR)

The 4 objectives include networking, roadmap development, updating resources, and supporting MT & MLIR tools.

Activities include surveys, market analysis, open-source tools, benchmarking, and dissemination via website and conferences.