Cooperation for Arabic Language Resources and Tools - The MEDAR Project

The paper describes some of the work carried out within the European funded project MEDAR. The project has three streams of activity: the technical stream, the cooperation stream and the dissemination stream. MEDAR has first updated the existing surveys and BLARK for Arabic, and then the technical stream focused on machine translation. The consortium identified a number of freely available MT systems and then customized two versions of the famous MOSES package. The Consortium addressed the needs to package MOSES for English to Arabic (while the main MT stream is on Arabic to English). For performance assessment purposes, the partners produced test data that allowed carrying out an evaluation campaign with 5 different systems (including from outside the consortium) and two online ones. Both the MT baselines and the collected data will be made available via ELRA catalogue. The cooperation stream focuses mostly on the cooperation roadmap for Human Language Technologies for Arabic. Cooperation Roadmap for the region directed towards the Arabic HLT in general. It is the purpose of the roadmap to outline areas and priorities for collaboration, in terms of collaboration between EU countries and Arabic speaking countries, as well as cooperation in general: between countries, between universities, and last but not least between universities and industry. 1. Background and Mission The goals of the MEDAR project are the production and availability of shareable LRs and tools, the advancement of Arabic language technology, in particular multilingual resources and tools and the collaboration between institutions from the Euro-Mediterranean countries towards these goals. We are now almost through the project and can see how it has worked. We believe that the approach can be generalised and applied successfully in other regions. MEDAR is structured in three overlapping ‘streams’: 1) the technical stream, 2) the Cooperation Roadmap stream, and 3) the dissemination stream. This paper has its main focus on the Cooperation Roadmap.