The 3rd Workshop on NLP for Languages Using Arabic Script (AbjadNLP 2027)

Location: Athens, Greece (tbc)

Workshop date, 14 March 2026 (tbc)

Full-day event 9am to 5:45pm

Venue: tbd

Co-located with The 20th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2027) [tbc]

About AbjadNLP

AbjadNLP advances NLP research for Arabic and the wider range of languages written in Arabic-derived scripts, including Abjad and Ajami writing traditions. Following the success of its latest edition at EACL in Rabat, Morocco, which received more than 90 submissions and accepted 71 papers, the workshop returns in 2027 as part of SIGARAB, the ACL Special Interest Group on Arabic NLP. The previous edition also featured four shared tasks, and the 2027 programme will expand this component further to cover a broader range of Abjad and Ajami languages. AbjadNLP continues to work closely with communities such as Masakhane, reinforcing its commitment to inclusive, community-driven 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/venues/abjadnlp/

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

Shared Tasks at AbjadNLP 2027

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.
Medical text classification in Arabic (multi-class classification): A collaborative research challenge advancing Arabic natural language processing in the medical domain
- Organisers:

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: tba

AbjadNLP 2027 will follow the EACL 2027 standards for submission format, review process, and ethical guidelines. All submissions must comply with the requirements outlined in the official EACL 2027 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 2027 will be peer reviewed. Accepted papers at AbjadNLP 2027 will be published in the EACL workshop proceedings on the ACL Anthology (see previous editions of AbjadNLP: https://aclanthology.org/venues/abjadnlp/).

AbjadNLP proceedings will be published as part of the EACL 2027 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 2027 Schedule) [tbc]:

13 October 2026: First call for workshop papers
13 November 2026: Second call for workshop papers
15 December 2026: Direct paper submission deadline
22 December 2026: Pre-reviewed ARR commitment deadline
5 January 2027: Notification of acceptance
19 January 2027: Camera-ready paper deadline
9 February 2027: Proceedings deadline
12 February 2027: Pre-recorded video deadline
9-14 March 2027: EACL 2027, Athens, Greece

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
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
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
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
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