Saturday - Sunday January 18-19, 2025

Co-located with COLING 2025
Abu Dhabi, UAE

The First Arabic NLP Winter School

Co-located with COLING 2025 in Abu Dhabi, January 18-19, 2025

Organized by SIGARAB

The First Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) Winter School was a two-day event designed to advance knowledge and skills in Arabic NLP research and development and to foster interdisciplinary exchange and networking among students, academics, and industry professionals in the field.

The program included expert-led panels, tutorials, and hands-on workshops.

We anticipated a wide range of participants, including researchers, undergraduate and graduate students, PhD candidates, and industry and government practitioners with an interest in Arabic NLP.

Over 100 people participated in the Winter School.

Pictures from the First Arabic NLP Winter School 2025.

Venues

The Winter School will take place over two days at different venues

Day 1 (Sat Jan 18, 2025) will be held at the MBZUAI Campus in Masdar City

Directions for getting to MBZUAI:

The MBZUAI campus is not directly on the main street.

Therefore, if you are driving or being dropped off, target heading to the Siemens Energy Building (https://maps.app.goo.gl/4wimdWfzqo6oz6Er9)

For self parking, you can go to the Siemens Energy Building car park (https://maps.app.goo.gl/ED2Fo8nAvrCr9fYRA)

Once at the Siemens Energy Building, MBZUAI is about a 2–3-minute walk from there.

From the parking lot, take the stairs towards the Incubator Center;

With this on your left continue to walk straight;

And before the end take a left and you will see the sign for MBZUAI.

Here is the location of the MBZUAI main building: https://maps.app.goo.gl/2FyC3UCax7x38xb38

Enter the building and go to the Third Floor, where the Arabic NLP Winter School check-in desk is located.

There will be signs to help you.

Day 2 (Sun Jan 19, 2025) will be held at ADNEC (with the first day of COLING 2025)

Schedule

Tentative, all time GST / GMT+4 / Abu Dhabi

Winter School Slides

HALA! : Hackathon for Arabic Language by aiXplain

We are happy that aiXplain will be running HALA! (Hackathon for Arabic Language by aiXplain) as part of the Arabic NLP Winter School!

This hackathon invites participants to innovate and collaborate on groundbreaking projects in Arabic NLP.

Schedule and Format: HALA! will run in two formats.

In-Person: Participants will gather to collaborate, ideate, and develop their projects in real-time (days 1 and 2 of the Winter School - January 18-19, 2025).
Online: Participants will work remotely, collaborating through digital platforms to create and submit their projects. aiXplain will provide virtual office hours during COLING 2025 (January 20-23).

Congratulations to the HALA Winners

First Place: ABLA

Team Haa: Sara Abbas, Mohamed Anwar, Dana Mohamed, and Sana Shaban

ABLA (Arabic Bilingual Learning Agent) is an AI agent designed to provide in-depth answers about the Arabic language—its intricate features, unique characteristics, and rich cultural heritage. Built to understand both English and various Arabic dialects, ABLA serves as a bridge for non-native speakers, making the beauty and complexity of Arabic more accessible to all.
(Aixplain Blog)

Second Place: Aixplore

Team Jeem: George Ibrahim, Abdelrahman Mohamed, Ashir Rashid, and Kareem Darwish

Aixplore is a travel planning tool that optimizes trips by generating efficient itineraries while considering the starting location, destination, time, and budget constraints.

Third Place: LahjaRAG

Team Yaa: Rawan Bondok, Omar El HerraouiHi, Adham Ibrahim

LahjaRAG bridges the gap between Arabic dialects with retrieval-augmented machine translation.

(Aixplain Blog)

Organizers

Nizar Habash, New York University Abu Dhabi
Houda Bouamor, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar
Hassan Sawaf, aiXplain
Kareem Darwish, Qatar Computing Research Institute and aiXplain
Hanan Aldarmaki, Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Presenters

Firoj Alam, Bashar Alhafni, Rawan Almatham, Houda Bouamor, Miqdad Dali, Hanan Al Darmaki, Kareem Darwish, Thiago Ferreira, Mark Franks, Nizar Habash, Injy Hamed, Salam Khalifa, Preslav Nakov, Ossama Obeid, Hassan Sawaf, and Wajdi Zaghouani.