MEDAR: Collaboration between European and Mediterranean Arabic Partners to Support the Development of Language Technology for Arabic

After the successful completion of the NEMLAR project 2003-2005, a new opportunity for a project was opened by the European Commission, and a group of largely the same partners is now executing the MEDAR project. MEDAR will be updating the surveys and BLARK for Arabic already made, and will then focus on machine translation (and other tools for translation) and information retrieval with a focus on language resources, tools and evaluation for these applications. A very important part of the MEDAR project is to reinforce and extend the NEMLAR network and to create a cooperation roadmap for Human Language Technologies for Arabic. It is expected that the cooperation roadmap will attract wide attention from other parties and that it can help create a larger platform for collaborative projects. Finally, the project will focus on dissemination of knowledge about existing resources and tools, as well as actors and activities; this will happen through newsletter, website and an international conference which will follow up on the Cairo conference of 2004. Dissemination to user communities will also be important, e.g. through participation in translators’ conferences. The goal of these activities is to create a stronger and lasting collaboration between EU countries and Arabic speaking countries. 1. Background and 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 focussing 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 supporting cooperation between European actors and actors in the Mediterranean region with the purpose of advancing the state of language technology for Arabic and other regional languages. See www.nemlar.org. The goals of the NEMLAR project was the production and availability of shareable LRs and tools, the advancement of Arabic language technology, and the collaboration between countries towards these goals. MEDAR shares this mission.