The 2nd Workshop on NLP for Languages Using Arabic Script

(AbjadNLP 2026), Rabat, Morocco (in-person)

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

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: 8 January 2026
Pre-reviewed (ARR) Submission Deadline: 10 January 2026
Notification of Acceptance: 24 January 2026
Camera-ready Papers Due: 3 February 2026
Workshop Dates: 24–29 March 2026 (TBC)

Programme Committee (to be confirmed)

Abdoulaye Diallo – Fula & Wolofal. Independent Researcher
Ahmed Abdelali – Arabic/Multilingual NLP. Humain, Saudi Arabia
Ahmed AbuRa’ed – Arabic. UBC, Canada
Alp Oktem – Tigrinya and Kanuri. Translators without Borders
Antonio Moreno Sandoval – Low Resourced Languages. UAM, Spain
Azizud Din – Pashto. University Malaysia Sarawak, Malaysia
Behnam Sabeti – Persian. Miras Technologies International, Iran
Chenggang Mi – Uyghur. Xinjiang Technical Institute, China
Clement Oyeleke – Yoruba. University of Ibadan, Nigeria
Daniel Whitenack – Kimbundu, Fulfulde, Pular. SIL International, USA
Derguene Mbaye – Wolofal. Baamtu, Senegal
Djamel Mostefa – Pashto. ELDA, France
Doaa Samy – Arabic. Cairo University, Egypt & LLI-UAM, Spain
Elias W BA – Fula and Wolofal. Baamtu, Senegal
Eric Atwell – Arabic/Multilingual NLP. Leeds University, UK
Frederick Apina – Swahili. Parrot.AI, Tanzania
George Giannakopoulos – Multilingual NLP. SKEL Lab – NCSR Demokritos, Greece
Haithem Afli – Arabic/Multilingual NLP. Dublin City University, Ireland
Hazem Hajj – Arabic/Multilingual NLP. American University of Beirut, Lebanon
Houda Anoun – Arabic NLP. Hassan II University of Casablanca, Morocco
Nassera Habbat – Arabic NLP. Hassan II University of Casablanca, Morocco
Houda Bouamor – Arabic/Multilingual NLP. CMU, Qatar
Ignatius Ezeani – Igbo, African Languages NLP. Lancaster University, UK
Imed Zitouni – Arabic/Multilingual NLP. Microsoft Research, USA
Karim Bouzoubaa – Arabic/Multilingual NLP. Mohamed Vth University, Morocco
Mariam Masoud – Kurdish. National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland
Lei Wang – Uyghur. Xinjiang Technical Institute, China
Muhammad Sharjeel – Urdu. COMSATS University Islamabad, Pakistan
Omid Momenzadeh – Persian. Miras Technologies International, Iran
Preni Golazizian – Persian. Miras Technologies International, Iran
Rao Muhammad Adeel Nawab – Urdu. COMSATS University Islamabad, Pakistan
Reza Fahmi – Persian. Miras Technologies International, Iran
Samuel Olanrewaju – Yoruba, Yagba and Basa. University of Ibadan, Nigeria
Scott Piao – Multilingual and Low Resourced Languages. Lancaster University, UK
Seyed Arad Ashrafi Asli – Persian. Miras Technologies International, Iran
Shervin Malmasi – Sorani Kurdish. Macquarie University, Australia
Sina Ahmadi – Kurdish. Department of Computational Linguistics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland
Sokhar Samb – Wolofal. ML & NLP, Senegal
Tonghai Jiang – Uyghur. Xinjiang Technical Institute, China
Waziri Shebogholo – Swahili. Parrot.AI, Tanzania
Wole Akin – IsiXhosa, Yorùbá, Hausa, and Igbo. University of Johannesburg, South Africa
Xi Zhou – Uyghur. Xinjiang Technical Institute, China
Yating Yang – Uyghur. Xinjiang Technical Institute, China
Zahra Majdabadi – Persian. Miras Technologies International, Iran