2024Q3 Reports: SIGARAB

Summary

The ACL Special Interest Group on Arabic Natural Language Processing (SIGARAB, www.sigarab.org) 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 January 2022 and is operating within the framework of the ACL's general guidelines for SIGs. The founding officers were president Nizar Habash (nizar.habash@nyu.edu), secretary Wassim El-Hajj (we07@aub.edu.lb), and treasurer Mona Diab (mdiab@andrew.cmu.edu).

Membership

At inception SIGARAB started with 427 members. Currently, the number of members is 841. SIGARAB also operates a mailing list that has 912 members.

Joining SIGARAB is done by filling this form.

Join the mailing list is done using this group.

Conferences, Workshops and Activities

SIGARAB is the main organizer of The Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (ArabicNLP 2024), co-located with ACL 2024 in Bangkok, Thailand in August 2024.

SIGARAB is the main organizer of The First Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (ArabicNLP 2023), co-located with EMNLP 2023 in Singapore in December 2023.

SIGARAB also sponsored and organized The Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (WANLP 2022), which was co-located with EMNLP 2022 in Abu Dhabi, UAE in December 2022.

Before the official establishment of SIGARAB, SIGARAB Officers & Advisory Committee organized all seven editions of WANLP at EMNLP 2014, ACL 2015, EACL 2017, ACL 2019, COLING 2020, EACL 2021, and EMNLP 2022, respectively (Arabic NLP Archives). They also supported The Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT 2022 and 2024), and the International Workshop on Arabic Big Data & AI (IWABIGDAI 2022), and sponsored The Masader Arabic NLP Data Catalog.

The ArabicNLP/WANLP Scholar page is located at ArabicNLP Scholar.

The OSACT Scholar page is located at OSACT Scholar

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 [1], 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. The next elections will be held in December 2024.

The president appointed Mr. Kamel Gaanoun as a Web Resource Manager for SIGARAB.

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, Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon 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, and MBZUAI, UAE.

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, Carnegie Mellon 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 Us

       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): December 2022, December 2024