This document provides information about a special issue of the Journal of King Saud University - Computer and Information Sciences on Arabic natural language processing. It lists important dates for the submission and review of extended abstracts, full papers, and the final version. The special issue seeks unpublished high quality papers on current research related to Arabic NLP, including topics such as part-of-speech tagging, morphological analysis, word sense disambiguation, named entity recognition, machine translation, and text summarization. The guest editors of the special issue are listed.

1. Important dates
Submission of extended
abstracts (300-500
words):
October 1st 2013
Notification of proposal
acceptance:
November 1st 2013
Submission of full papers:
January 30th 2014
Notification of paper
acceptance:
March 30th 2014
Final version submission:
May 31st 2014
Publication date:
November 2014
Submission System
http://ees.elsevier.com/jks
u-cis/
Special Issue Editor
Hend Al-Khalifa –
Associate professor,
Information Technology
Department,
College of Computer and
Information Sciences,
King Saud University
hendk@ksu.edu.sa
Arabic NLP: Current State and
Future Challenges
About the Journal
The Journal of King Saud University - Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) is produced
and hosted by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University (KSU). The CIS Journal
publishes peer-reviewed research articles in computer and information sciences; it was
founded in 1994 and is published in http://ees.elsevier.com/jksu-cis/.
Abstract
Arabic is a member of the Semitic languages family that uses a distinct alphabet set and
spoken by more than 340 million individuals as their first language. It is the official language,
either solely or jointly, in twenty countries located in the Middle East and Africa. Arabic is
the language of the Holly Qur’aan and one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
Arabic Natural language processing (NLP) is still in its initial stage compared to the work
in English and other languages. NLP is made possible by the collaboration of many
disciplines including computer science, linguistics, mathematics, psychology and artificial
intelligence. The results of which are highly beneficial for many applications such as machine
translation, Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, text summarization and
Question Answering.
This special issue of CCIS Journal is intended to present the current state of research on
Arabic NLP, Arabic computational linguistics, and related areas. We welcome unpublished
high quality papers (in English) on current state of Arabic NLP including, but not limited to:
 Part of Speech Tagging
 Morphological analysis and generation
 Word sense and Syntactic disambiguation
 Transliteration, transcription and diacritization
 Named Entity Recognition
 Corpus Linguistics (corpora, electronic dictionaries, treebanks, etc.)
 Machine Translation
 Information Extraction
 Information Retrieval
 Question Answering
 Semantic and Sentiment analysis
 Text Clustering, Classification and Summarization
 Text and Web content mining
http://ees.elsevier.com/jksu-cis/
Journal of King Saud University
Computer and Information Sciences
Official Journal of KSU – College of Computer and Information Sciences
Guest Editors:
 Eric Atwell – Associate Professor, Language research group, I-AIBS institute for artificial intelligence and biological systems,
School of computing, Faculty of engineering, University of Leeds.
 Khaled Shaalan – Associate Professor at Faculty of Computers & Information, Cairo Univ. (on Secondment to The British
University in Dubai).
 Imed Zitouni – PhD, Principal Researcher at Microsoft, Member of the Relevance and Measurement team of Microsoft.