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Riyadh to Host International Conference on Arabic Language Computing

A view of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (SPA)
A view of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (SPA)
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Riyadh to Host International Conference on Arabic Language Computing

A view of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (SPA)
A view of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (SPA)

The King Salman Global Academy for the Arabic Language will hold its third international conference in Riyadh from October 6 to 7.

Tackling "Arabic language computing and linguistic data enrichment", the event is expected to draw local, regional, and international institutions involved in the field.

University professors, and 40 researchers from 22 countries will attend to tackle subjects, such as computational linguistics, computer science, and Arabic language.

Through this conference, the academy hopes to contribute to the integration of the work of computer scientists and linguists in computational linguistics, bridge the knowledge gap, present their work and projects, and enrich Arabic datasets to improve and develop AI models.

It also seeks to support Arabic language automated processing and make it accessible, in line with the objectives of the Human Capability Development Program, one of Saudi Vision 2030 programs.

The conference will address topics related to the automated processing of the Arabic language, including machine learning, speech-to-text conversion, automated recognition of images, and topics related to computational linguistics, used in learning and teaching Arabic.

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Culture

Thousands Greet the Winter Solstice at the Ancient Stonehenge Monument

A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)
A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)
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Thousands Greet the Winter Solstice at the Ancient Stonehenge Monument

A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)
A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)

Thousands of tourists, pagans, druids and people simply yearning for the promise of spring marked the dawn of the shortest day of the year at the ancient Stonehenge monument on Saturday.

Revelers cheered and beat drums as the sun rose at 8:09 a.m. (0809 GMT) over the giant standing stones on the winter solstice — the shortest day and the longest night in the Northern Hemisphere. No one could see the sun through the low winter cloud, but that did not deter a flurry of drumming, chanting and singing as dawn broke.

There will be less than eight hours of daylight in England on Saturday — but after that, the days get longer until the summer solstice in June.

The solstices are the only occasions when visitors can go right up to the stones at Stonehenge, and thousands are willing to rise before dawn to soak up the atmosphere.

The stone circle, whose giant pillars each took 1,000 people to move, was erected starting about 5,000 years ago by a sun-worshiping Neolithic culture, according to The AP. Its full purpose is still debated: Was it a temple, a solar calculator, a cemetery, or some combination of all three?

In a paper published in the journal Archaeology International, researchers from University College London and Aberystwyth University said the site on Salisbury Plain, about 128 kilometers (80 miles) southwest of London, may have had political as well as spiritual significance.

That follows from the recent discovery that one of Stonehenge’s stones — the unique stone lying flat at the center of the monument, dubbed the “altar stone” — originated in Scotland, hundreds of miles north of the site. Some of the other stones were brought from the Preseli Hills in southwest Wales, nearly 240 kilometers (150 miles) to the west,

Lead author Mike Parker Pearson from UCL’s Institute of Archaeology said the geographical diversity suggests Stonehenge may have served as a “monument of unification for the peoples of Britain, celebrating their eternal links with their ancestors and the cosmos.”