A rabic Natural Language Processing (2022)

Abstract: The Arabic language continues to be the focus of an increasing number of projects in natural language processing (NLP) and computational linguistics (CL). This tutorial provides NLP/CL system developers and researchers (computer scientists and linguists alike) with the necessary background information for working with Arabic in its various forms: Classical, Modern Standard and Dialectal. We discuss various Arabic linguistic phenomena and review the state-of-the-art in Arabic processing from enabling technologies and resources, to common tasks and applications. The tutorial will explain important concepts, common wisdom, and common pitfalls in Arabic processing. Given the wide range of possible issues, we invite tutorial attendees to bring up interesting challenges and problems they are working on to discuss during the tutorial.

## tutorial description the purpose of this tutorial is to provide system developers and researchers in natural language processing (nlp) and computational linguistics (cl) with the necessary background information for working with the arabic language (modern standard arabic, classical arabic and arabic dialects). the goal is to introduce arabic linguistic phenomena that need to be addressed from orthography and phonology, to morphology, syntax and semantics, as well as to review the state-of-the-art on arabic processing from enabling technologies and resources, to common tasks and applications. alternative approaches will be presented and contrasted for their value in different application contexts. the tutorial will explain important concepts, common wisdom, common pitfalls, as well as basic skills for handling arabic text, even when illiterate in the arabic script. ## tutorial outline this tutorial introduces the different challenges and current solutions to the automatic processing of arabic and its dialects. the tutorial has three parts (60 minutes each). the second part will be split into two portions, 30 minutes before the coffee break, and 30 minutes after. part 1: arabic nlp challenges we present the main challenges arabic poses for nlp. topics include arabic script and orthography, orthographic ambiguity and noise, arabic morphology, morphological richness, complexity and ambiguity, arabic syntactic and semantic considerations, and arabic dialectal variations and their challenges. part 2: arabic nlp solutions we review the state-of-the-art in arabic nlp covering several enabling technologies and applications, e.g., transliteration schemes, morphological processing (analysis, disambiguation, tokenization, pos tagging), orthographic normalization, dialect identification, text analytics, syntactic parsing, and language modeling. throughout the presentation we will make references to the different resources and tools available including discussing arabic annotation standards, tools, and best practices. we will provide links to recent publications and available toolkits and resources. part 3: arabic nlp new frontiers in this section, we highlight some of the latest efforts and open problems in arabic nlp, from work on summarization to text simplification, spelling and grammar correction, and gender rewriting. we review the various ongoing arabic nlp shared tasks and discuss the directions the field is going into, while drawing on historical trends and patterns. this part will interactively draw on the audience and their interests in arabic nlp. ## prerequisites this is an introductory tutorial. no previous knowledge in arabic is needed. this tutorial is designed for computer scientists and linguists alike. acquaintance with basic formal language theory and knowledge of some programming languages will be useful. ## preparatory pointers the following are a set of optional initial pointers that will help the attendees maximize their learning experience.