2022Q3 Reports: SIGARAB

2022Q3 Reports: SIGARAB

SIGARAB is the Special Interest Group of the Association for Computational Linguistics for researchers concerned with all aspects of Arabic NLP.

The activities of SIGARAB include the exchange and propagation of research results, publications and resources relevant to all subareas of Arabic NLP, and for all Arabic variants (Standard, Classical and Dialectal); as well as the coordination between organizations in academia and industry throughout the world performing research in Arabic NLP or using Arabic NLP.

Membership

The official establishment of SIGARAB was on January 15, 2022. As of July 15, 2022, SIGARAB has 427 members (39% women).

Board

SIGARAB's current officers are still its First Year Officers:

• President: Nizar Habash, Computer Science, New York University Abu Dhabi
• Secretary: Wassim El-Hajj, Computer Science, American University of Beirut, Lebanon
• Treasurer Mona Diab, Meta and The George Washington University

The SIG has a 19-member advisory board, listed at http://www.sigarab.org/.

Elections

SIGARAB plans its first formal elections to take place in Fall 2022.

Activities

Meetings

SIGARAB is sponsoring three Arabic NLP workshops in 2022

• The Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (WANLP)
  • Dec 2022 @ EMNLP 2022 --- http://wanlp2022.arabic-nlp.net

• The Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT)
  • Jun 2022 @ LREC 2022 --- https://osact-lrec.github.io/

• International Workshop on Arabic Big Data & AI (IWABigDAI)
  • May 2022 --- https://sites.google.com/view/arabicbigdata

Initiatives

SIGARAB is sponsoring The Masader Arabic NLP Data Catalouge: https://arbml.github.io/masader/.

Communications

Website

SIGARAB website is at http://www.sigarab.org/.

Mailing List

The SIGARAB mailing list is at https://groups.google.com/g/sigarab.

Future

• SIGARB plans to host The Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (WANLP 2022).
• SIGARB plans to submit a proposal to host The Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (WANLP 2023).
• SIGARAB plans to host a business meeting alongside the planned workshop in 2022.