The term natural language refers to any system of symbolic communication (spoken, signed or written) without intentional human planning and design. This distinguishes natural languages such as Arabic and Japanese from artificially constructed languages such as Esperanto or Python. Natural language processing (NLP) is the sub-field of artificial intelligence (AI) focused on modeling natural languages to build applications such as speech recognition and synthesis, machine translation, optical character recognition (OCR), sentiment analysis (SA), question answering, dialogue systems, etc. NLP is a highly interdisciplinary field with connections to computer science, linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, mathematics and others. Some of the earliest AI applications were in NLP (e.g., machine translation); and the last decade (2010-2020) in particular has witnessed an incredible increase in quality, matched with a rise in public awareness, use, and expectations of what may have seemed like science fiction in the past. NLP researchers pride themselves on developing language independent models and tools that can be applied to all human languages, e.g. machine translation systems can be built for a variety of languages using the same basic mechanisms and models. However, the reality is that some languages do get more attention (e.g., English and Chinese) than others (e.g., Hindi and Swahili). Arabic, the primary language of the Arab world and the religious language of millions of non-Arab Muslims is somewhere in the middle of this continuum. Though Arabic NLP has many challenges, it has seen many successes and developments. Next we discuss Arabic's main challenges as a necessary background, and we present a brief history of Arabic NLP. We then survey a number of its research areas, and close with a critical discussion of the future of Arabic NLP.
Arabic dialect identification is a specific task of natural language processing, aiming to automatically predict the Arabic dialect of a given text. Arabic dialect identification is the first step in various natural language processing applications such as machine translation, multilingual text-to-speech synthesis, and cross-language text generation. Therefore, in the last decade, interest has increased in addressing the problem of Arabic dialect identification. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of Arabic dialect identification research in written texts. We first define the prob…
Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）
The paper describes the Egyptian Arabic-to-English statistical machine translation (SMT) system that the QCRI-Columbia-NYUAD (QCN) group submitted to the NIST OpenMT'2015 competition. The competition focused on informal dialectal Arabic, as used in SMS, chat, and speech. Thus, our efforts focused on processing and standardizing Arabic, e.g., using tools such as 3arrib and MADAMIRA. We further trained a phrase-based SMT system using state-of-the-art features and components such as operation sequence model, class-based language model, sparse features, neural network joint model, genre-based hier…
Building natural language processing systems for non standardized and low resource languages is a difficult challenge. The recent success of large-scale multilingual pretrained language models provides new modeling tools to tackle this. In this work, we study the ability of multilingual language models to process an unseen dialect. We take user generated North-African Arabic as our case study, a resource-poor dialectal variety of Arabic with frequent code-mixing with French and written in Arabizi, a non-standardized transliteration of Arabic to Latin script. Focusing on two tasks, part-of-spee…
Jordan University of Science and Technology（约旦科技大学）
In this work, we present several deep learning models for the automatic diacritization of Arabic text. Our models are built using two main approaches, viz. Feed-Forward Neural Network (FFNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), with several enhancements such as 100-hot encoding, embeddings, Conditional Random Field (CRF) and Block-Normalized Gradient (BNG). The models are tested on the only freely available benchmark dataset and the results show that our models are either better or on par with other models, which require language-dependent post-processing steps, unlike ours. Moreover, we show t…
Ecole nationale Supérieure d’Informatique（国立高等计算机学院）；GEOLSemantics（GEOL语义公司）；Altran IT（阿尔特朗信息技术公司）；Inalco（法国东方语言文化学院）
Arabic is recognised as the 4th most used language of the Internet. Arabic has three main varieties: (1) classical Arabic (CA), (2) Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), (3) Arabic Dialect (AD). MSA and AD could be written either in Arabic or in Roman script (Arabizi), which corresponds to Arabic written with Latin letters, numerals and punctuation. Due to the complexity of this language and the number of corresponding challenges for NLP, many surveys have been conducted, in order to synthesise the work done on Arabic. However these surveys principally focus on two varieties of Arabic (MSA and AD, wri…
The study of natural language, especially Arabic, and mechanisms for the implementation of automatic processing is a fascinating field of study, with various potential applications. The importance of tools for natural language processing is materialized by the need to have applications that can effectively treat the vast mass of information available nowadays on electronic forms. Among these tools, mainly driven by the necessity of a fast writing in alignment to the actual daily life speed, our interest is on the writing auditors. The morphological and syntactic properties of Arabic make it a …
NADI 2026: The Second Multidialectal Arabic Speech Processing Shared Task
The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals（法赫德国王石油与矿业大学）；Avignon Université（阿维尼翁大学）；ELYADATA（ELYADATA公司）；King Abdullah University of Science & Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）；NYU Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）
Deep neural networks have shown good data modelling capabilities when dealing with challenging and large datasets from a wide range of application areas. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) offer advantages in selecting good features and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks have proven good abilities of learning sequential data. Both approaches have been reported to provide improved results in areas such image processing, voice recognition, language translation and other Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Sentiment classification for short text messages from Twitter is a challenging t…
A Comprehensive Analysis of Arabic Natural Language Processing Research: Trends, Topic Evolution, and Research Gaps -- A Bibliometric and Topic-Based Study
Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University（西迪·穆罕默德·本·阿卜杜拉大学）
Arabic morphological analysis is one of the essential stages in Arabic Natural Language Processing. In this paper we present an approach for Arabic morphological analysis. This approach is based on Arabic morphological automaton (AMAUT). The proposed technique uses a morphological database realized using XMODEL language. Arabic morphology represents a special type of morphological systems because it is based on the concept of scheme to represent Arabic words. We use this concept to develop the Arabic morphological automata. The proposed approach has development standardization aspect. It can b…
As natural language processing systems become more widespread, it is necessary to address fairness issues in their implementation and deployment to ensure that their negative impacts on society are understood and minimized. However, there is limited work that studies fairness using a multilingual and intersectional framework or on downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce four multilingual Equity Evaluation Corpora, supplementary test sets designed to measure social biases, and a novel statistical framework for studying unisectional and intersectional social biases in natural language proc…
New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；University of Bahrain（巴林大学）
Most Arabic natural language processing tools and resources are developed to serve Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which is the official written language in the Arab World. Some Dialectal Arabic varieties, notably Egyptian Arabic, have received some attention lately and have a growing collection of resources that include annotated corpora and morphological analyzers and taggers. Gulf Arabic, however, lags behind in that respect. In this paper, we present the Gumar Corpus, a large-scale corpus of Gulf Arabic consisting of 110 million words from 1,200 forum novels. We annotate the corpus for sub-d…
University of Tunis El Manar（突尼斯马纳尔大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Sentiment analysis is a task of natural language processing which has recently attracted increasing attention. However, sentiment analysis research has mainly been carried out for the English language. Although Arabic is ramping up as one of the most used languages on the Internet, only a few studies have focused on Arabic sentiment analysis so far. In this paper, we carry out an in-depth qualitative study of the most important research works in this context by presenting limits and strengths of existing approaches. In particular, we survey both approaches that leverage machine translation or …
The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) has developed hundreds of data corpora for natural language processing (NLP) research. Among these are a number of annotated treebank corpora for Arabic. Typically, these corpora consist of a single collection of annotated documents. NLP research, however, usually requires multiple data sets for the purposes of training models, developing techniques, and final evaluation. Therefore it becomes necessary to divide the corpora used into the required data sets (divisions). This document details a set of rules that have been defined to enable consistent division…
The Arabic language is a morphologically rich language with relatively few resources and a less explored syntax compared to English. Given these limitations, Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks like Sentiment Analysis (SA), Named Entity Recognition (NER), and Question Answering (QA), have proven to be very challenging to tackle. Recently, with the surge of transformers based models, language-specific BERT based models have proven to be very efficient at language understanding, provided they are pre-trained on a very large corpus. Such models were able to set new standards and achiev…
We observe a recent behaviour on social media, in which users intentionally remove consonantal dots from Arabic letters, in order to bypass content-classification algorithms. Content classification is typically done by fine-tuning pre-trained language models, which have been recently employed by many natural-language-processing applications. In this work we study the effect of applying pre-trained Arabic language models on "undotted" Arabic texts. We suggest several ways of supporting undotted texts with pre-trained models, without additional training, and measure their performance on two Arab…
Over the recent decades, there has been a significant increase and development of resources for Arabic natural language processing. This includes the task of exploring Arabic Language Sentiment Analysis (ALSA) from Arabic utterances in both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and different Arabic dialects. This study focuses on detecting sentiment in poems written in Misurata Arabic sub-dialect spoken in Misurata, Libya. The tools used to detect sentiment from the dataset are Sklearn as well as Mazajak sentiment tool 1. Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Naive Bayes (NB), and Support Vector Machines…
University of Setif1（塞提夫1大学）；Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系）
This paper provides a method for indexing and retrieving Arabic texts, based on natural language processing. Our approach exploits the notion of template in word stemming and replaces the words by their stems. This technique has proven to be effective since it has returned significant relevant retrieval results by decreasing silence during the retrieval phase. Series of experiments have been conducted to test the performance of the proposed algorithm ESAIR (Enhanced Stemmer for Arabic Information Retrieval). The results obtained indicate that the algorithm extracts the exact root with an accur…
NADI 2025: The First Multidialectal Arabic Speech Processing Shared Task
The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·卡伊夫大学）；Birzeit University（伯莱兹大学）；MBZUAI（穆罕默德·本·拉希德智能科学与技术研究院）；NYU Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎克分校）
The complexities of Arabic language in morphology, orthography and dialects makes sentiment analysis for Arabic more challenging. Also, text feature extraction from short messages like tweets, in order to gauge the sentiment, makes this task even more difficult. In recent years, deep neural networks were often employed and showed very good results in sentiment classification and natural language processing applications. Word embedding, or word distributing approach, is a current and powerful tool to capture together the closest words from a contextual text. In this paper, we describe how we co…
Sarcasm is a form of figurative language where the intended meaning of a sentence differs from its literal meaning. This poses a serious challenge to several Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications such as Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, and Author Profiling. In this paper, we present our participating system to the intended sarcasm detection task in English and Arabic languages. Our system\footnote{The source code of our system is available at \url{https://github.com/AbdelkaderMH/iSarcasmEval}} consists of three deep learning-based models leveraging two existing pre-trained languag…
Enabling empathetic behavior in Arabic dialogue agents is an important aspect of building human-like conversational models. While Arabic Natural Language Processing has seen significant advances in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) with language models such as AraBERT, Natural Language Generation (NLG) remains a challenge. The shortcomings of NLG encoder-decoder models are primarily due to the lack of Arabic datasets suitable to train NLG models such as conversational agents. To overcome this issue, we propose a transformer-based encoder-decoder initialized with AraBERT parameters. By initi…
The availability of corpora is a major factor in building natural language processing applications. However, the costs of acquiring corpora can prevent some researchers from going further in their endeavours. The ease of access to freely available corpora is urgent needed in the NLP research community especially for language such as Arabic. Currently, there is not easy was to access to a comprehensive and updated list of freely available Arabic corpora. We present in this paper, the results of a recent survey conducted to identify the list of the freely available Arabic corpora and language re…
Institute of Statistical Studies and Research (ISSR), Cairo University（开罗大学统计研究与研究所）；Faculty of Computers and Information, Cairo University（开罗大学计算机与信息学院）
Text segmentation task is an essential processing task for many of Natural Language Processing (NLP) such as text summarization, text translation, dialogue language understanding, among others. Turns segmentation considered the key player in dialogue understanding task for building automatic Human-Computer systems. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to turn segmentation into utterances for Egyptian spontaneous dialogues and Instance Messages (IM) using Machine Learning (ML) approach as a part of automatic understanding Egyptian spontaneous dialogues and IM task. Due to the lack of Eg…
DialectSentEval 2026: Arabic Dialect Sentiment Analysis and Swapping Shared Task
King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals（法赫德国王石油矿产大学）；Onaizah Colleges（欧奈扎学院）；University College of Applied Sciences（应用科学大学学院）；Lancaster University（兰卡斯特大学）；UM6P（穆罕默德六世理工大学）；VinUniversity；El Technology；University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学）
The preprocessing phase is one of the key phases within the text classification pipeline. This study aims at investigating the impact of the preprocessing phase on text classification, specifically on offensive language and hate speech classification for Arabic text. The Arabic language used in social media is informal and written using Arabic dialects, which makes the text classification task very complex. Preprocessing helps in dimensionality reduction and removing useless content. We apply intensive preprocessing techniques to the dataset before processing it further and feeding it into the…
In recent years, we witnessed great progress in different tasks of natural language understanding using machine learning. Question answering is one of these tasks which is used by search engines and social media platforms for improved user experience. Arabic is the language of the Holy Qur'an; the sacred text for 1.8 billion people across the world. Arabic is a challenging language for Natural Language Processing (NLP) due to its complex structures. In this article, we describe our attempts at OSACT5 Qur'an QA 2022 Shared Task, which is a question answering challenge on the Holy Qur'an in Arab…
Mohammed VI Polytechnic University（穆罕默德六世理工大学）；Cadi Ayyad University（卡迪·阿亚德大学）
The prevalence of toxic content on social media platforms, such as hate speech, offensive language, and misogyny, presents serious challenges to our interconnected society. These challenging issues have attracted widespread attention in Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. In this paper, we present the submitted systems to the first Arabic Misogyny Identification shared task. We investigate three multi-task learning models as well as their single-task counterparts. In order to encode the input text, our models rely on the pre-trained MARBERT language model. The overall obtained results…
Enhanced Arabic Text Retrieval with Attentive Relevance Scoring
University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU（巴斯克国家大学UPV/EHU）；Lab. de Genie Electrique (LAGE), University of Ouargla（电气工程实验室（LAGE），奥尔加拉大学）；Faculty of Pharmacy, Helsinki University（药学院，赫尔辛基大学）；IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science（ikerbasque，巴斯克科学基金会）；Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi（索邦大学阿布扎比）
The Landscape of Arabic Large Language Models (ALLMs): A New Era for Arabic Language Technology
is a Researcher at iWAN Research Group, King Saud University（iWAN研究组，国王沙特大学）；is a Senior Scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）；is a Professor at King Saud University（国王沙特大学）；Head of iWAN Research Group（iWAN研究组）
Gradient methods have applications in multiple fields, including signal processing, image processing, and dynamic systems. In this paper, we present a nonlinear gradient method for solving convex supra-quadratic functions by developing the search direction, that done by hybridizing between the two conjugate coefficients HRM [2] and NHS [1]. The numerical results proved the effectiveness of the presented method by applying it to solve standard problems and reaching the exact solution if the objective function is quadratic convex. Also presented in this article, an application to the problem of …
MIRACL, University of Sfax（斯法克斯大学MIRACL研究所）；Marin Mersenne, University Paris1（巴黎第一大学马林·梅森研究所）；Panthéon Sorbonne（先贤祠-索邦大学）；LASELDI, University of Franche-Comte（弗朗什-孔泰大学LASELDI实验室）
The recognition of Arabic Named Entities (NE) is a problem in different domains of Natural Language Processing (NLP) like automatic translation. Indeed, NE translation allows the access to multilingual in-formation. This translation doesn't always lead to expected result especially when NE contains a person name. For this reason and in order to ameliorate translation, we can transliterate some part of NE. In this context, we propose a method that integrates translation and transliteration together. We used the linguis-tic NooJ platform that is based on local grammars and transducers. In this p…
The George Washington University（乔治华盛顿大学）；AWS, Amazon AI（亚马逊云科技亚马逊人工智能）
Linguistic Code Switching (CS) is a phenomenon that occurs when multilingual speakers alternate between two or more languages/dialects within a single conversation. Processing CS data is especially challenging in intra-sentential data given state-of-the-art monolingual NLP technologies since such technologies are geared toward the processing of one language at a time. In this paper, we address the problem of Part-of-Speech tagging (POS) in the context of linguistic code switching (CS). We explore leveraging multiple neural network architectures to measure the impact of different pre-trained em…
ArbESC+: Arabic Enhanced Edit Selection System Combination for Grammatical Error Correction Resolving conflict and improving system combination in Arabic GEC
Department of Computer Sciences, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology（计算机科学系，计算与信息技术学院）；King Abdulaziz University（国王阿卜杜勒阿齐兹大学）；Saudi Electronic University（沙特电子大学）
