Proceedings of the EACL 2009 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages - Semitic '09

We are delighted to present you with this volume containing the papers accepted for presentation at the EACL 2009 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages, held in Athens, Greece, on March 31st, 2009. The Workshop is an opportunity for the ACL Special Interest Group on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages to meet and discuss current and future directions in Computational Linguistic and Natural Language Processing approaches to Semitic Languages. Previous workshops took place in 1998 (Montreal), 2002 (Philadelphia), 2005 (Ann Arbor) and 2007 (Prague). We are happy to see more, better submissions every year. This year we received 19 submissions, of which 9 were selected for presentation and are included in this volume. These papers address Arabic (both standard and dialectal), Hebrew and Ancient Syriac, as well as general issues pertaining to all Semitic languages. We are privileged to have Prof. Michael Gasser (Indiana University) as our keynote speaker this year. Professor Gasser will talk on Finite state morphology for Ethiopian Semitic languages.