The 2nd Workshop on NLP for Languages Using Arabic Script (AbjadNLP 2026)

Location: Rabat, Morocco (in-person)

Workshop date, Saturday 28 March 2026

Full-day event 9am to 5:30pm

Venue: Palais Des Congres (Room: SALLE Les Riad)

Co-located with The 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026)

~~📣 New: Paper Submission deadline extended to 15 January 2026~~

📢 Submission URL: https://softconf.com/eacl2026/AbjadNLP2026

📢 **Shared tasks registration is now open, see links below

About AbjadNLP

AbjadNLP focuses on advancing NLP for Arabic and all languages written in Arabic-derived scripts. Following the success of the 2025 edition at COLING Abu Dhabi, the 2026 workshop returns as part of SIGARAB, the ACL Special Interest Group on Arabic NLP. Our organisers also collaborate closely with Masakhane, reflecting our commitment to community-driven, inclusive NLP across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

The workshop welcomes work on:

Arabic (MSA, Classical Arabic, dialects)
Perso-Arabic languages such as Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Sorani Kurdish, Azeri, Ottoman Turkish, Sindhi, Uyghur
Ajami traditions across Africa, including Hausa, Fula, Wolofal, Swahili, Kanuri, Mandingo, Tamazight and others

Together, these communities represent almost one billion speakers, yet many remain under-resourced in NLP. Strengthening technology for these languages is not only a scientific challenge but also essential for preserving linguistic heritage and improving digital inclusion.

Previous proceedings:
https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2025.abjadnlp-1/

Motivation

Arabic-script languages form one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse language families in the world. AbjadNLP aims to support this diversity by improving resources, tools, and research practices for under-represented languages and dialects.

We invite contributions that support:

Inclusive and open NLP ecosystems
Cross-community collaboration (academia, industry, grassroots groups)
Long-term capacity building for low-resource and minority languages

Topics of Interest

We invite work on all NLP areas related to Arabic-script languages, including:

Core NLP: morphology, tokenisation, tagging, parsing, NER, sentiment, and language modelling (including LLMs for low-resource settings).
Applications: machine translation, speech technologies, OCR/handwriting recognition, QA, conversational systems, and social media analysis.
Resources: corpora, lexicons, orthography documentation, and tools for low-resource or marginalised languages.
Culture & Sociolinguistics: code-switching, dialects, transliteration, orthographic variation, and language preservation.
Interdisciplinary: NLP for education, health, finance, legal or cultural heritage domains, as well as ethics, fairness, and evaluation for under-represented languages.

Keynote Speaker

Dr Violetta Laura Cavalli-Sforza (Al Akhawayn University, Ifrane, Morocco)

Violetta Cavalli-Sforza is a full-time Computer Science faculty member at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, where she has worked since 2008. She holds graduate degrees in Civil Engineering and Computer Science, culminating in a Ph.D. in Intelligent Systems Studies. Her doctoral dissertation focused on computer-assisted instruction to visualize scientific argumentation. She worked in natural language processing, particularly in machine translation, at Carnegie Mellon University, but her research in the last few years has focused on language learning through reading and readability of texts, particularly for Arabic. She has taught a variety of topics in Computer Science at the graduate and undergraduate level. She has coordinated the Center for the Advancement of Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship (ATLAS), dedicated to faculty development, has been Assistant Vice President for Academic Research and is currently the Computer Science Program Lead.

Shared Tasks at AbjadNLP 2026**

AbjadNLP 2026 will host four shared tasks covering Arabic and other Abjad languages (full details to follow). These tasks aim to support research across the wide family of languages written in Arabic-derived scripts.

AbjadGenEval: Abjad AI Generated Text Detection Shared Task for Languages Using Arabic Script
AbjadStyleTransfer: Shared Task on Authorship Style Transfer (Text Generation): Transform a formal input text into the style of a specified author while preserving semantics.
AbjadAuthorID: Abjad Authorship Identification (Multiclass Classification): Identify the author of a given text excerpt across diverse genres and periods.
- Organisers of shared-tasks 1, 2 and 3:
  - Dr Saad Ezzini, KFUPM, Saudi Arabia
  - Dr Shadi Abudalfa, KFUPM, Saudi Arabia
  - Dr Ahmad Abdelali, Humain, Saudi Arabia
  - Dr Mo El-Haj, VinUni, Vietnam
  - Dr Sina Ahmadi, University of Zurich
  - Dr Nadir Durrani, HBKU, Qatar
  - Dr Hassan Sajjad, Dalhousie university, Canada
  - Dr Farah Adeeba, University of Massachusetts amherst, USA.
- Registration:
  - 📢 Registration now open (see the url for each of the shared-tasks above)
Medical text classification in Arabic (multi-class classification): A collaborative research challenge advancing Arabic natural language processing in the medical domain
- Organisers:
- Registration:
  - 📢 Registration now open: https://forms.gle/paziGMMsDHahRhz4A

Organising Committee:

General Chair:

Dr Mo El-Haj
Reader/Associate Professor, VinUniversity, Vietnam; Lancaster University, UK

Publicity Chairs

	Dr Amal Haddad Haddad Assistant Professor, University of Granada, Spain
	Ms Cynthia Amol NLP Researcher, Maseno University, Kenya

Programme Chairs

	Prof. Paul Rayson Director of UCREL Research Centre, Lancaster University, UK
	Prof. Mustafa Jarrar Director of SINA Research Lab, HBKU / Birzeit University
	Dr Ignatius Ezeani Senior Research Associate, Lancaster University, UK
	Dr Saad Ezzini Assistant Professor, KFUPM, Saudi Arabia

Publication Chair

Dr Sina Ahmadi
Postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computational Linguistics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland

Shared-Task Chairs

	Dr Ahmad Abdelali Humain, Saudi Arabia
	Dr Shadi Abudalfa Research Engineer, KFUPM, Saudi Arabia

Advisory Committee

Prof. Nizar Habash (New York Abu Dhabi, UAE).
Prof. Miriam Butt (University of Konstanz, Germany)
Prof. Ruslan Mitkov (Lancaster University, UK)

Diversity and Inclusion

AbjadNLP is inherently committed to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, reflecting ACL’s broader mission to support underrepresented languages, researchers, and communities in NLP. Our focus on Arabic-script languages naturally encompasses a wide range of linguistic, cultural, and regional diversity across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

Submission Format and Guidelines

Submission URL: https://softconf.com/eacl2026/AbjadNLP2026

AbjadNLP 2026 will follow the EACL 2026 standards for submission format, review process, and ethical guidelines. All submissions must comply with the requirements outlined in the official EACL 2026 Call for Papers.

We adhere to EACL’s submission policies, including:

Anonymous submissions: All papers must be fully anonymised for double-blind peer review.
ACL Rolling Review (ARR): Authors may submit papers either directly to the workshop or via the ACL Rolling Review system within the stated deadlines.

For formatting, authors must use the official ACL style templates, which are available on GitHub, including an Overleaf template for convenience.

Long papers: Up to 8 pages, presenting substantial, original, completed, and unpublished research.
Short papers: Up to 4 pages, describing smaller, focused contributions, negative results, work in progress, or system demonstrations.

References do not count towards the page limit, and all submissions will undergo double-blind review.

Desk Rejection

A submission may be desk rejected for one or more of the following reasons:

The submission is not anonymous. This includes author names, email addresses, acknowledgements, or links to non-anonymised GitHub or HuggingFace repositories.
The paper length is outside the allowed range, it must be between 4 and 8 pages excluding references. Non-core sections such as limitations and ethical considerations are excluded from the page count.
The paper does not follow the ACL format. Please ensure you are using the official ACL templates

Proceedings and Publication

Papers submitted to AbjadNLP 2026 will be peer reviewed. Accepted papers at AbjadNLP 2026 will be published in the EACL workshop proceedings on the ACL Anthology (for example, EACL 2024: https://aclanthology.org/events/eacl-2024/ and AbjadNLP 2025: https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2025.abjadnlp-1/).

AbjadNLP proceedings will be published as part of the EACL 2026 proceedings. EACL proceedings have historically been indexed by Scopus, but indexing is decided by Scopus after publication and cannot be guaranteed in advance.

Key Dates (Aligned with EACL 2026 Schedule):

First Call for Papers: 15 October 2025
Second Call for Papers: 30 November 2025
Third Call for Papers: 19 December 2025
Direct Submission Deadline: 15 January 2026 (extended)
Pre-reviewed (ARR) Submission Deadline: 15 January 2026 (extended)
Notification of Acceptance: 30 January 2026
Camera-ready Papers Due: 6 February 2026
Workshop Dates: 28 March 2026 (Saturday) Full-day 9am to 5:30pm

Programme Committee (to be confirmed)

Abdelbasset Djamai, Datategy & NAMAA Community, Algeria
Abderrahim El Yessefi, Faculty of Sciences and Techniques of Tangier (FSTT), Morocco
Abdullah I. Alharbi, King Salman Global Academy for Arabic, Saudi Arabia
Ahmed Abdelali, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar
Ali Al-Laith, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Alp Oktem, CollectivaT, Spain
Azizud Din, University Malaysia Sarawak, Malaysia
Balaji Nagarajan, Lowe’s United States
Btissam Er-Rahmadi, Huawei Technologies R&D, United Kingdom
Djamel Mostefa, SYSTRA Group, France
Doaa Samy, Cairo University, Egypt
Fadi Zaraket, UAB, Lebanon
Mohamad Ballout, UAB, Lebanon
Fatima Ez-Zahraa Bazay, Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco
Haithem Afli, ADAPT Centre, Ireland
Hamada Nayel, Benha University, Egypt
Hessa Alawwad, Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic, Saudi Arabia
Houda Anoun, Hassan II University of Casablanca, Morocco
Ignatius Ezeani, Lancaster University, United Kingdom
Imed Zitouni, Meta, United States
Kareem Darwish, QCRI, Qatar
Khloud Al Jallad, Syrian Society for Startups and Research (SySSR)
Latifa Iben Nasr, University of Sfax, Tunisia
Manish Adawadkar, Nike, United States
Muhammad Adeel, University of Management and Technology (UMT), Pakistan
Muhammad Sharjeel, COMSATS University Islamabad, Pakistan
Mustafa Jarrar, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar
Nadia Ghezaiel, University of Ha’il, Saudi Arabia
Najwa Alghamdi, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Niranjan Kumar M, Lowe’s United States
Noor Abo Mokh, MBZUAI, UAE
Paul Rayson, Lancaster University, United Kingdom
Pranav Gupta, Cisco, United States
Passant Elchafei, Ulm University, Germany
Rania Azad M. San Ahmed, Sulaimani Polytechnic University, Iraq
Raziullah Khan, HCL Technologies, USA
Reham Marzouk, MBZUAI, UAE
Saad Ezzini, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia
Sadam Al-Azani, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia
Samira Ellouze, University of Sfax, Tunisia
Shadi Abudalfa, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia
Shatha Altammami, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia
Shervin Malmasi, Macquarie University, Australia
Sina Ahmadi, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Salim Al Mandhari, Lancaster University, United Kingdom
Satyam Raj, Arizona State University, United States
Serry Sibaee, Prince Sultan University, Saudi Arabia
Seyed Arad Ashrafi Asli, MIRAS Technologies, Iran
Yamina Leyla Moussaoui, C.R.S.T.D.L.A, Algeria