The British University in Dubai (BUiD) organised the Fourth International Conference on Arabic Computational Linguistics (ACLing 2018) in collaboration with Al Nile University. The 2-day conference was held at BUiD’s campus in Dubai International Academic City on 17-18 November 2018.
Computational Linguistics is a type of artificial intelligence in which computational and mathematical methods are used to analyse the human language. Its goal for end users is to facilitate interactions with computers using conversational language.
ACLing 2018 is the fourth edition of the Arabic Computational Linguistics series (ACLing). The conference brought together leading academics, scientists, researchers and practitioners from all over the world to discuss the latest research in the areas of Arabic Computational Linguistics and natural language processing (NLP).
The conference aimed to promote Arabic language and to co-ordinate efforts in this area of research. It also covered all aspects of Arabic Computational Linguistics in text, audio, image, and video in theory and practice. The conference included several specialised sessions with participation from local and international academics and researchers. It had accepted 37 research papers from 19 countries.
All accepted papers were published in the Procedia Computer Science by ELSEVIER. Procedia Computer Science is an electronic journal focusing entirely on publishing high quality conference proceedings.
BUiD’ Vice Chancellor, Prof. Abdullah Alshamsi, welcomed the conference’s participants and said, “The British University in Dubai is playing a key role in addressing the Arabic computational linguistics’ research areas and contributing to the promoting of the Arabic Language. There is a lot of work that should be done in this area especially with relation to artificial intelligence, which is increasingly gaining importance nowadays.”
Prof. Khaled Shaalan, Head of IT Master’s programmes and PhD Computer Science at BUiD, stressed the importance of Arabic computational linguistics and said, “The information revolution and the rapid development in technology and computation in all aspects of life have created a real need for adopting Artificial Intelligence approaches in the automatic processing of natural languages”. He added that computational linguistics include many subtopics which need to be studied also such as natural language understanding ,which is about understanding the inputs created by humans, and natural language generation, which focuses on generating natural language narratives”
BUiD as a research- based University is committed to the UAE’s vision of a knowledge -based economy. The University has created and disseminated knowledge through its faculty and students’ research and through organising such academic conferences and events.
