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). The workshop received sponsorship from Google Research, where the funds were used to cover registration and travel fees for a selected number of students. 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 the increasing interest in the WANLP workshop series.

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].

Elections

SIGARAB was founded beginning of 2022 by the following officers: president Nizar Habash (nizar.habash@nyu.edu), secretary Wassim El-Hajj (we07@aub.edu.lb), and treasurer Mona Diab (mdiab@fb.com).

In December 2022, and following the Election of Officers guidelines of SIGARAB [11], three members of the Advisory Committee volunteered to organize and run the elections of SIGARAB officers. The founding officers ran for the same positions they held before, and were elected to serve in their same positions for two consecutive years.

SIGARAB Officers & Advisory Committee

Officers

Nizar Habash, President, Computer Science, New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE

Wassim El-Hajj, Secretary, Computer Science, American University of Beirut, Lebanon

Mona Diab, Treasurer, Facebook and The George Washington University, USA

Kamel Gaanoun, Scholar Page Resource Manager, PhD Student, Institut National de Statistiques et d'Economie Appliquée, Morocco

Advisory Committee

Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, UBC, Canada.

Ahmed Ali, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar.

Hend Alkhalifa, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia.

Houda Bouamor, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar.

Fethi Bougares, Le Mans University, France.

Khalid Choukri, ELDA, European Language Resource Association, France.

Kareem Darwish, aiXplain Inc.

Mona Diab, George Washington University, USA.

Mahmoud El-Haj, Lancaster University, UK.

Samhaa El-Beltagy, Nile University, Egypt.

Wassim El-Hajj, American University of Beirut, Lebanon.

Nizar Habash, New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Lamia Hadrich Belguith, University of Sfax, Tunisia.

Hazem Hajj, American University of Beirut, Lebanon.

Walid Magdy, University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Khaled Shaalan, The British University in Dubai, UAE.

Kamel Smaili, University of Lorraine, France.

Nadi Tomeh, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, France.

Wajdi Zaghouani, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar.

Imed Zitouni, Google, USA.

Contact SIGARAB

       web page: http://www.sigarab.org/
       contacts: president Nizar Habash (nizar.habash@nyu.edu), secretary Wassim El-Hajj (we07@aub.edu.lb) 
       elections (last,next): Founded in 2022, elections every two years