Call for Papers: The 1st Workshop on NLP for Languages Using Arabic Script (AbjadNLP 2025)
Co-located with COLING 2025 Conference, Abu Dhabi, UAE (19-20 January 2025)
The workshop is proud to highlight our connections with the Masakhane NLP community and collaborations with institutions worldwide, such as COMSATS on Urdu, and the long-standing UCREL NLP Group at Lancaster University, whose work encompasses over 20 languages worldwide, including Abjad and Ajami languages.
Note: We chose the name Abjad for simplicity, but our focus includes Abjad and other languages that have adopted the Arabic and Perso-Arabic scripts, as well as Ajami languages. We acknowledge that Sorani Kurdish, when written in Arabic script, follows an alphabet style rather than an Abjad style.
Topics of Interest:
- Core Technologies: morphological analysis, disambiguation, tokenisation, POS tagging, named entity detection, chunking, parsing, semantic role labelling, sentiment analysis, language modelling, etc.
- Applications: machine translation, speech recognition, speech synthesis, optical character recognition, assistive technologies, social media, etc.
- Resources and Tools: dictionaries, annotated data, corpora, orthography descriptions, font technology, glyph rendering, text input methodologies, spell-checking, speech-to-text solutions, BLARK descriptions, open access corpora.
- Cultural and Sociolinguistic Considerations: text processing, transliteration challenges, and solutions, cultural contexts in NLP applications.
Submission Guidelines:
We follow the COLING 2025 standards for submission format and guidelines. Submissions should conform to the following types:
- Long papers: Up to eight (8) pages, presenting substantial, original, completed, and unpublished work.
- Short papers: Up to four (4) pages, describing a small focused contribution, negative results, system demonstrations, etc.
Key Dates:
- 1st Call for Papers Announcement: 16 July 2024
- 2nd Call for Papers Announcement: 16 August 2024
- Paper Submission Deadline: 15 November 2024
- Notification of Paper Acceptance: 6 December 2024
- Camera-ready Paper Deadline: 13 December 2024
- Workshop Date: 19 or 20 January 2025
Organising Committee:
General Chair: Mo El-Haj, Lancaster University
Programme Chairs:
- Hugh Paterson III, Collaborative Scholar
- Saad Ezzini, Lancaster University
- Ignatius Ezeani, Lancaster University
Review Committee:
- Mahum Hayat Khan, University of La Rioja
- Muhammad Sharjeel, COMSATS University Islamabad
Publication Chair: Sina Ahmadi, University of Zurich
Publicity Chairs:
- Cynthia Amol, Maseno University
- Amal Haddad Haddad, University of Granada
- Jaleh Delfani, University of Surrey
Advisory Committee:
- Ruslan Mitkov, Lancaster University
- Paul Rayson, Lancaster University