"IJCNLP October 11^th-13^th, 2005"

Meeting with AFNLP Board

The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP) association promotes information and research co-operation among researchers in the region. It also co-ordinate initiatives of the region with those of the other regions in Natural Language Processing and the related fields.  The official members of the AFNLP are either professional associations or research institutions in countries of the region, which represent researchers in the countries or which take on the responsibility of representing them.

Dr. Sarmad Hussain was invited in the board meeting of AFNLP association held in conjunction with IJCNLP-05.  Dr. Sarmad Hussain introduced PAN Localization Project to the board.  He further elaborated the project objectives, the expected project outputs, capacity building trainings conducted through the project and discussed the status of natural language processing in developing Asia.

The presentation slides are available at the following link:

• NLP in Developing Asia PAN Localization Project by Dr. Sarmad Hussain, NUCES, Lahore, Pakistan

Panel on "PAN Localization Project: Status and Challenges Faced Across

The 2^nd International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP-05) was organized by the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing in Korea, from October 11^th-13^th, 2005.

IJCNLP organized an exclusive panel on  "PAN Localization Project: Status and Challenges Faced Across Developing Asia".  The regional and the country team leaders who participated in discussion were Dr. Sarmad Hussain (Regional Project Leader, PAN Localization Project), Dr. Mumit Khan (Project Leader, PAN L10n Project Bangladesh) and Dr. Ruvan Weerasinghe (Project Leader, PAN L10n Project Sri Lanka ).  They elaborated the role of PAN Localization Project in advancing the level of NLP in the region. Through this panel discussion these participants also  presented the status of development of local language computing in their respective countries and regionally.  IJCNLP partially sponsored the representation of PAN Localization Project team members at this conference.

The presentation slides are available at following links:

• PAN Localization Project by Dr. Sarmad Hussain, NUCES, Lahore, Pakistan

• Status and Challenges of Local Language Computing in Bangladesh By Dr. Mumit Khan, BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

• NLP in Sri Lanka: Where it is and where it could be By Dr. Ruvan Weerasinghe, UCSC, Colombo, Sri Lanka

• NLP in Developing Asia: Lessons from PAN Localization Project by Dr. Sarmad Hussain, NUCES, Lahore, Pakistan
   

ALR Workshop

The mission of ALRN (Asian Language Recourse Network www.language-resource.net ) is to create a network of qualified Asian partners to specify and support  the development of high priority language resources.  It is primarily focusing to identify the language resources in the region.  Language resources are unanimously recognized as a central component of the linguistics infrastructure.  The availability of language resources is a significant issue thus in response  to UNESCO's action agenda in enabling, fostering, facilitating, increasing  and enlarging the multi lingual resources, Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) decided to give 3 year financial support to initiate Asian Language Resource Network (ALRN) project. 

5th workshop on Asian Language Resources (ALR) was held in conjunction with International Joint Committee on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP) on 14^th October, 2005.

Dr. Sarmad Hussain Regional Project Leader, PAN Localization Project was invited to present in the workshop.  ALR sponsored the representation of PAN Localization Project Leader at this workshop.  

The presentation slides are available at the following link:

• Language Resources in Developing Asia by Dr. Sarmad Hussain, NUCES, Lahore, Pakistan