The journey started on 20/6/2010, and ended on 21/9/2010.
What? Three months! Yes it took us three months to find our golden idea.
In July...
We collected experiences read some tips from blogs of Dr.Mohamed Samy and Alaa Shaker, asked for advices from previous experience, attended Dr. Mohamed Samy’s session about ideas in Arabic Natural Language Processing, surfed the internet, and went to companies and libraries.
We looked for all possible computer science fields to choose one of them. The summary of the survey was written in our blog "Computer Science Fields"
Regarding the Arabic language:
- Arabic is the language of the Holy Quran.
- The Arabic language was ranked as the sixth most spoken language in the world.
- Arabic is our mother language, so we prefer the Arabic language over any other one.
- There is still little programming research in the Arabic language.
- TA.Hatem Abdel Ghani, T.A.Omar Mohammad Othman, T.A.Mohamed Fathy, TA.Roaa encourage us to work in Arabic NLP cause of the on going update & progress.
So, finally we choose to work in Arabic Natural Language Processing (ANLP).
In August...
It was time for looking for all possible ideas, these are the ideas we got:
- Machine Translation.
- Summarization.
- Text classification/ Categorization.
- Mind Map Generation.
- Opinion mining.
- ".الاعراب " تشكيل أواخر الكلمات
- Question Answering.
- Arabic dialect normalization .(تحويل من عامية الى فصحى)
- Spell Checker.
- Grammar Checker.
- UML Generation.
- OCR (Optical Character Recognition).
- Handwriting Recognition.
And searched for papers for each idea, you can see the summary of the survey here.
In September…
From these ideas we chose opinion mining, text classification, Arabic dialect normalization, text summerization and Arabic question answering system.
It was not easy to chose one idea from these 5 ideas,
Some Tips ;)
- Start early.
- If you haven't a team nor a project idea, work in parallel, search for the team and for an idea.
- It was a good thing to choose the field before the idea, instead of searching 3 months on different ideas without any output, we are looking for papers and topics related to our field so the survey was useful.
- If you still have not an idea, go to the doctors and ask them they will help you, don't wait to find an idea.
