Abjad 2026 Programme
| Workshop date | Saturday 28 March 2026 |
| Participation | Hybrid (in-person and online) |
| Venue | Palais Des Congres (Room: SALLE Les Riad) |
| Workshop duration | 9:00 – 17:45 |
| Time | Mode | Presentation |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00–09:15 | Welcome and overview of the shared tasks Mo El-Haj, Saad Ezzini, Ahmad Abdelali, Shadi Abudalfa |
|
| 09:15–10:00 | Keynote: Dr. Violetta Cavalli-Sforza | |
| Session 1: Benchmarking | ||
| 10:00–10:15 | Online | AraLingBench: A Human-Annotated Benchmark for Evaluating Arabic Linguistic Capabilities of Large Language Models Mohamad Bilal Zbib, Hasan Abed Al, Kader Hammoud, Ammar Mohanna, Nadine Rizk, Fatima Karnib, Sina Moukaled, Bernard Ghanem |
| 10:15–10:30 | Online | U-MIRAGE: Benchmarking Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Urdu Medical QA Ali Faheem, Faizad Ullah, Muhammad Hammad, Ahmed Hassan, Muhammad Sohaib Ayub, Asim Karim |
| 10:30–11:00 | Coffee break | |
| Session 2: Morphology | ||
| 11:00–11:15 | Online | AjamiMorph: Zero-Annotation Morphological Discovery for Hausa Ajami via Multi-Method Consensus Soumedhik Bharati, Shibam Mandal, Prithwish Ghosh, Swarup Kr Ghosh, Sayani Mondal |
| 11:15–11:30 | Online | Morphological Feature Extraction for Fine-Grained Sorani Kurdish Dialect Identification Soumedhik Bharati, Shibam Mandal, Subham Majumdar, Swarup Kr Ghosh, Sayani Mondal |
| 11:30–11:45 | In-person | Murabaa: A Comprehensive Resource Platform for Arabic Morphology Karim Bouzoubaa, Driss Namly, Hamid Jihad, Rachida Tajmout, Jamal Ezzouaine, Hakima Khamar |
| 11:45–12:00 | In-person | QAMAR: A Fully Verified Quranic Arabic Morphological Analysis Resource Sara Faqihi, Karim Bouzoubaa, Rachida Tajmout, Driss Namly |
| Session 3: Sentiment | ||
| 12:00–12:15 | In-person | Rethinking Polarity Detection: When BPE Fails Across Scripts Manodyna K H, Luc De Nardi |
| 12:15–12:30 | Online | Enhancing Urdu Sentiment Classification through Instruction-Tuned LLMs Hasan Faraz Khan, Noor Fatima, Irfan Ahmad |
| 12:30–12:45 | Online | Improving Models for Sentiment Analysis on Saudi-English Code-Switching Text Samaher Alghamdi, Paul Rayson, Reem Alotibi |
| 12:45–13:00 | In-person | Reliability-Guided QUBO Selection for Arabic Sentiment Prediction Rabab Alkhalifa |
| 13:00–14:00 | Lunch break | |
| Session 4: Character set issues | ||
| 14:00–14:15 | Online | KazakhOCR: Multimodal Benchmark for Low-Resource Kazakh Script OCR Henry Gagnier, Sophie Gagnier, Ashwin Kirubakaran |
| 14:15–14:30 | Online | Character-Level Transformer for Tajik–Persian Transliteration Arabov Mullosharaf Kurbonovich |
| 14:30–14:45 | Online | Orthographic Robustness of Persian Named Entity Recognition Models Henry Gagnier, Sophie Gagnier |
| 14:45–15:00 | In-person | Code-Switching as a Safety Failure Mode in Large Language Models Waleed Jamil, Saima Rafi |
| 15:00–15:15 | Online | AraModernBERT: Transtokenized Initialization and Long-Context Encoder Modeling for Arabic Omar Elshehy, Omer Nacar, Abdelbasset Djamai, Muhammed Ragab, Khloud Al Jallad, Mona Abdelazim |
| 15:15–15:30 | Online | From Classical to Contemporary: Evolutionary Analysis & Classification of Urdu Poetry Noor Fatima, Hasan Faraz Khan, Irfan Ahmad |
| 15:30–16:30 | Poster session (coffee break 15:30–16:00) <<<See list of accepted posters below>>> | |
| Session 5: Speech and toxicity | ||
| 16:30–16:45 | In-person | Current State of LLMs for Arabic Dialectal Machine Translation Josef Jon, Rawan Bondok, Ondřej Bojar |
| 16:45–17:00 | In-person | LLM-to-Speech: A Synthetic Data Pipeline for Training Dialectal Text-to-Speech Models Ahmed Khamis, Hesham Ali Ahmed |
| 17:00–17:15 | Online | Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Self-Supervised Models for Arabic Speech Recognition Wafa Mohammed Alshehri, Wasfi G. Al-Khatib, Mohammad Ismail Amro |
| 17:15–17:30 | Online | Optimizer Choice and Calibration for QARiB on Arabic-Script Social Media Offensive Language Detection Auda Elshokry, Mohammed Alhanjouri |
| 17:30–17:45 | Online | HACS-TL: Cross-Script Transfer Learning for Hausa Ajami Hate Speech Detection Using Transformer-Based Architecture Abdulkadir Shehu Bichi, Muqaddar Ali, Prashant Sharma, Ismail Dauda Abubakar |
List of accepted posters
| Paper title | Authors |
|---|---|
| Tarab: A Multi-Dialect Corpus of Arabic Lyrics and Poetry | Mo El-Haj |
| Seeing Words Differently: Visual Embeddings for Robust English-Arabic Machine Translation | Mahdi Alshaikh Saleh and Irfan Ahmad |
| QurSci-Onto: A Hierarchical Ontology and Dataset for Scientific Exegesis in the Quran | Ibad-ur-Rehman Rashid, Junaid Hussain and Sadam Al-Azani |
| OMAN-SPEECH: A Multi-Layer Annotated Speech Corpus for Omani Arabic Dialects | Rayyan S. Al Khadhuri, Firas Al Mahrouqi, Salim Al Mandhari, Amir Azad Al-Kathiri, Omar Said Alshahri, Ghassab Mansoor Alsaqr, Badri Abdulhakim Mudhsh and Tarek Fatnassi |
| Hala Technical Report Building Arabic-Centric Instruction & Translation Models at Scale | Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud, Mohamad Bilal Zbib and Bernard Ghanem |
| From Posts to Pressure: An Arabic Dataset about Stress and Mental-Health Monitoring | Wajdi Zaghouani, Eman Sedqy Shlkamy and Mabrouka Bessghaier |
| DeformAR: A Visual Analytics Framework for Evaluation of Arabic Named Entity Recognition | Ahmed Mustafa Younes |
| Back-of-the-Book Index Automation for Arabic Documents | Nawal Haidar, Ahmad Kashmar and Fadi Zaraket |
| ArabicDialectHub: A Cross-Dialectal Arabic Learning Resource and Platform | Salem Lahlou |
| Arabic-Adapted One-Step Speech-to-Diacritized ASR: Evaluation and Error Analysis | Osamah A. I. Abduljalil, Dalal Ali, Razan A. Bajaman and Abdullah I. Alharbi |
| Arabic Dialect Translation with Small LLMs: Enhancing through Reasoning-Oriented Reinforcement Learning | Sohaila Abdulsattar and Keith Ross |
| Arabic Citation Parsing using Part of Speech and Named Entity Recognition | Youssef Karout, Hadi Hammoud and Fadi Zaraket |
| Alkhalil Corpus: An Open-Source Thematic and Lemmatized Corpus for Modern Standard Arabic | Samir Belayachi and Azzeddine Mazroui |
| A Knowledge Graph Based Diagnostic Framework for Analyzing Hallucinations in Arabic Machine Reading Comprehension | Najwa Abdullah AlGhamdi, Sadam Al-Azani, Kwabena Nuamah and Alan Bundy |
| A Hybrid Confidence-Aware Framework for Arabic Toxicity Detection in Social Media | Fawzia Zaal Alanazi, Asma Mohammed Alamri, Arwa Bin Saleh and Abdullah I. Alharbi |
| A Corpus-Based Investigation of Contemporary Arabic Dialects Using the SADA Corpus | Ghada Alfattni |