2023Q3 Reports: SIGARAB

Summary

The ACL Special Interest Group on Arabic Natural Language Processing (SIGARAB) [1] provides a forum for researchers, institutions, and enthusiasts to discuss and promote advances in Arabic Natural Language Processing (Arabic NLP). Arabic is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, the national language of over 400 million people from 23 states, and the liturgical language of 1.8 billion Muslims around the world. Hence, SIGARAB is one of few venues that gathers individuals from diverse backgrounds whose common interest is Arabic NLP.

SIGARAB was founded in 2022 and is operating within the framework of the ACL's general guidelines for SIGs. The founding officers constituted from: president Nizar Habash (nizar.habash@nyu.edu), secretary Wassim El-Hajj (we07@aub.edu.lb), and treasurer Mona Diab (mdiab@fb.com).

Membership

At inception SIGARAB started with 427 members. A year later and currently, the number of members is 627. 250 of the members are females and 377 are males, indicating a good gender balance. SIGARAB also operates a mailing list that has 697 members, 283 of which are not yet members and might officially join SIGARAB.

Joining SIGARAB is done by filling the following form: [2].

Join the mailing list is done using the following group: [3].

Workshops and Activities

SIGARAB is the main organizer of The First Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (WANLP 2023) [4], co-located with EMNLP 2023 [5] in Singapore in December 2023. WANLP 2023 builds on the seven previous workshop editions, which have been extremely successful drawing in a large active participation in various capacities.

SIGARAB also sponsored and organized The Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (WANLP 2022) [6], which was co-located with EMNLP 2022 [7] in Abu Dhabi, UAE (Dec 8th, 2022). Right after this event SIGARAB Officers & Advisory Committee decided to proceed with organizing the WANLP workshop series, but under the Conference heading given the big success of and increasing interest in WANLP workshops.

Before the official establishment of SIGARAB, SIGARAB Officers & Advisory Committee organized all the seven editions of WANLP at EMNLP 2014, ACL 2015, EACL 2017, ACL 2019, COLING 2020, EACL 2021, and EMNLP 2022, respectively. They also organized The Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT 2022 [8]), and the International Workshop on Arabic Big Data & AI (IWABIGDAI 2022 [9]), and sponsored The Masader Arabic NLP Data Catalouge [10].

SIGARAB: SIG on Arabic Natural Language Processing

       web page: http://www.sigarab.org/
       contacts: president Nizar Habash (nizar.habash@nyu.edu), secretary Wassim El-Hajj (we07@aub.edu.lb) 
       members: 427
       elections (last,next): Founded in 2022, elections every two years
       events: WANLP 2022 (http://wanlp2022.arabic-nlp.net), OSACT 2022 (https://osact-lrec.github.io/), IWABigDAI (https://sites.google.com/view/arabicbigdata/home)