Program
  Note: all times are in UTC+8  

Saturday November 8

(8:30 - 8:45) Welcome Speech & State of SIGARAB

(8:45 - 09:30) Invited Talk by Houda Bouamor: “Beyond Resources: Building an Arabic NLP Ecosystem Rooted in Representation, Collaboration, and Responsibility”

(9:30 - 10:30) Session 1: LLM Benchmarking & Development (1)

Session Chair: Nizar Habash

• (09:30 - 09:45) - AraHalluEval: A Fine-grained Hallucination Evaluation Framework for Arabic LLMs
  Aisha Alansari and Hamzah Luqman 

• (09:45 - 10:00) - BALSAM: A Platform for Benchmarking Arabic Large Language Models
  Rawan Nasser Almatham, Kareem Mohamed Darwish, Raghad AlRasheed, Waad Thuwaini Alshammari, Muneera Alhoshan, Amal Almazrua, Asma Al Wazrah, Mais Alheraki, Firoj Alam, Preslav Nakov, Norah A. Alzahrani, Eman Albilali, Nizar Habash, Abdelrahman Mustafa ElSheikh, Muhammad Elmallah, Hamdy Mubarak, Zaid Alyafeai, Mohamed Anwar, Haonan Li, Ahmed Abdelali, Nora Altwairesh, Maram Hasanain, Abdulmohsen AlThubaity, Shady Shehata, Bashar Alhafni, Injy Hamed, Go Inoue, Khalid N. Elmadani, Ossama Obeid, Fatima Haouari, Tamer Elsayed, Emad A. Alghamdi, Khalid Almubarak, Saied Alshahrani, Ola Aljareh, Safa Alajlan, Areej Alshaqarawi, Maryam Alshihri, Sultana Alghurabi, Atikah Alzeghayer, Afrah Altamimi, Abdullah Alfaifi and Abdulrahman M Alosaimy

• (10:00 - 10:15) - 3LM: Bridging Arabic, STEM, and Code through Benchmarking
  Basma El Amel Boussaha, Leen Al Qadi, Mugariya Farooq, Shaikha Alsuwaidi, Giulia Campesan, Ahmed Alzubaidi, Mohammed Alyafeai and Hakim Hacid

• (10:15 - 10:30) - Nile-Chat: Egyptian Language Models for Arabic and Latin Scripts
  Guokan Shang, Hadi Abdine, Ahmad Chamma, Amr Mohamed, Mohamed Anwar, Abdelaziz Bounhar, Omar El Herraoui, Preslav Nakov, Michalis Vazirgiannis and Eric P. Xing

(10:30 - 11:00) Coffee Break

(11:00 - 11:30) Session 2: LLM Benchmarking & Development (2)

Session Chair: Firoj Alam

• (11:00 - 11:15) - Mind the Gap: A Review of Arabic Post-Training Datasets and Their Limitations
  Mohammed Alkhowaiter, Saied Alshahrani, Norah F Alshahrani, Reem I. Masoud, Alaa Alzahrani, Deema Alnuhait, Emad A. Alghamdi and Khalid Almubarak

• (11:15 - 11:30) - Adapting Falcon3-7B Language Model for Arabic: Methods, Challenges, and Outcomes
  Basma El Amel Boussaha, Mohammed Alyafeai, Ahmed Alzubaidi, Leen Al Qadi, Shaikha Alsuwaidi and Hakim Hacid

(11:30 - 12:30) Session 3: Arabic Resources, Modeling, and Representation

Session Chair: Mustafa Jarrar

• (11:30 - 11:45) - Evaluating Prompt Relevance in Arabic Automatic Essay Scoring: Insights from Synthetic and Real-World Data
  Chatrine Qwaider, Kirill Chirkunov, Bashar Alhafni, Nizar Habash and Ted Briscoe

• (11:45 - 12:00) - Lemmatizing Dialectal Arabic with Sequence-to-Sequence Models
  Mostafa Saeed and Nizar Habash

• (12:00 - 12:15) - Semitic Root Encoding: Tokenization Based on the Templatic Morphology of Semitic Languages in NMT
  Brendan T. Hatch and Stephen D. Richardson

• (12:15 - 12:30) -  Learning Word Embeddings from Glosses: A Multi-Loss Framework for Arabic Reverse Dictionary Tasks
  Engy Ibrahim, Farhah Adel, Marwan Torki and Nagwa El-Makky

(12:30 - 14:00) - Lunch Break + SIGARAB Business Meeting

(14:00 - 14:30) Session 4: Multi-Modality

Session Chair: Bashar Alhafni

• (14:00 - 14:15) - AMCrawl: An Arabic Web-Scale Dataset of Interleaved Image-Text Documents and Image-Text Pairs
  Shahad Aboukozzana, Muhammad Kamran J Khan and Ahmed Ali

• (14:15 - 14:30) - TuniFra: A Tunisian Arabic Speech Corpus with Orthographic Transcriptions and French Translations
  Alex Choux, Marko Avila, Josep Crego, Fethi Bougares and Antoine Laurent

(14:30 - 15:30) Shared Task Overviews (1)

Session Chair: Sakhar Alkhereyf

• (14:30 - 14:40) - Shared Task 1: ImageEval Arabic Image Captioning
  Ahlam Bashiti, Alaa Aljabari, Hadi Khaled Hamoud, Md. Rafiul Biswas, Bilal Mohammed Shalash, Mustafa Jarrar, Fadi Zaraket, George Mikros, Ehsaneddin Asgari and Wajdi Zaghouani

• (14:40 - 14:50) - Shared Task 2: Iqra'Eval: Qur'anic Pronunciation Assessment
  Yassine El Kheir, Amit Meghanani, Hawau Olamide Toyin, Nada Almarwani, Omnia Ibrahim, Yousseif Ahmed Elshahawy, Mostafa Shahin and Ahmed Ali

• (14:50 - 15:00) - Shared Task 3: NADI 2025: Multidialectal Arabic Speech Processing
  Bashar Talafha, Hawau Olamide Toyin, Peter Sullivan, AbdelRahim A. Elmadany, Abdurrahman Juma, Amirbek Djanibekov, Chiyu Zhang, Hamad Alshehhi, Hanan Aldarmaki, Mustafa Jarrar, Nizar Habash and Muhammad Abdul-Mageed

• (15:00 - 15:10) - Shared Task 4: MAHED 2025: Multimodal Detection of Hope and Hate Emotions in Arabic Content
  Wajdi Zaghouani, Md. Rafiul Biswas, Mabrouka Bessghaier, Shimaa Ibrahim, George Mikros, Abul Hasnat and Firoj Alam

• (15:10 - 15:20) - Shared Task 5: AraGenEval: Arabic Authorship Style Transfer and AI Generated Text Detection
  Shadi Abudalfa, Saad Ezzini, Ahmed Abdelali, Hamza Alami, Abdessamad Benlahbib, Salmane Chafik, Mo El-Haj, Abdelkader El Mahdaouy, Mustafa Jarrar, Salima Lamsiyah and Hamzah Luqman

• (15:20 - 15:30) - Shared Task 6: TAQEEM 2025: The First Task for Arabic Quality Evaluation of Essays in Multi-dimensions
  May Bashendy, Salam Albatarni, Sohaila Eltanbouly, Walid Massoud, Houda Bouamor and Tamer Elsayed

(15:30 - 16:00) - Coffee Break

(16:00 - 17:00) Shared Task Overviews (2)

Session Chair: Sakhar Alkhereyf

• (16:00 - 16:10) - Shared Task 7: BAREC 2025: Arabic Readability Assessment Shared Task
  Khalid N. Elmadani, Bashar Alhafni, Hanada Taha and Nizar Habash

• (16:10 - 16:20) - Shared Task 8: AraHealthQA 2025: Comprehensive Arabic Health Question Answering
  Hassan Alhuzali, Farah E. Shamout, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Chaimae Abouzahir, Mouath Abu Daoud, Ashwag Alasmari, Walid Al-Eisawi, Renad Al-Monef, Ali Alqahtani, Lama Ayash, Nizar Habash and Leen Kharouf

• (16:20 - 16:30) - Shared Task 9: IslamicEval: Capturing LLMs Hallucination in Islamic Content
  Hamdy Mubarak, Rana Malhas, Watheq Mansour, Abubakr Mohamed, Mahmoud Fawzi, Majd Hawasly, Tamer Elsayed, Kareem Mohamed Darwish and Walid Magdy

• (16:30 - 16:40) - Shared Task 10: PalmX 2025: The First Shared Task on Benchmarking LLMs on Arabic Culture
  Fakhraddin Alwajih, Abdellah El Mekki, Hamdy Mubarak, Majd Hawasly, Abubakr Mohamed and Muhammad Abdul-Mageed

• (16:40 - 16:50) - Shared Task 11: QIAS 2025: Q&A in Islamic Studies Assessment
  Abdessalam Bouchekif, Samer Rashwani, Emad Soliman Ali Mohamed, Mutaz Alkhatib, Heba Sbahi, Shahd Gaben, Wajdi Zaghouani, Aiman Erbad and Mohammed Ghaly

(17:00 - 18:00) Poster Session

• Saudi-Alignment Benchmark: Assessing LLMs Alignment with Cultural Norms and Domain Knowledge in the Saudi Context
  Manal Alhassoun, Imaan Mohammed Alkhanen, Nouf Alshalawi, Ibtehal Baazeem and Waleed Alsanie

• Zero-Shot and Fine-Tuned Evaluation of Generative LLMs for Arabic Word Sense Disambiguation
  Yossra Noureldien, Abdelrazig Mohamed and Farah Attallah

• Modeling North African Dialects from Standard Languages
  Yassine Toughrai, Kamel Sma¨ ıli and David Langlois 

• ArabicWeb-Edu: Educational Quality Data for Arabic LLM Training
  Majd Hawasly, Tasnim Mohiuddin, Hamdy Mubarak and Sabri Boughorbel

• ATHAR: A High-Quality and Diverse Dataset for Classical Arabic to English Translation
  Mohammed Sabry Mohammed and Mohammed Khalil

• Tahḏīb: A Rhythm-Aware Phrase Insertion for Classical Arabic Poetry Composition
  Mohamad Elzohbi and Richard Zhao

• Transfer or Translate? Argument Mining in Arabic with No Native Annotations
  Sara Nabhani and Khalid Al Khatib 

• WojoodOntology - Ontology-Driven LLM Prompting for Unified Information Extraction Tasks
  Alaa Aljabari, Nagham Hamad, Mohammed Khalilia and Mustafa Jarrar

• Bridging Dialectal Gaps in Arabic Medical LLMs through Model Merging
  Ahmed Ibrahim, Abdullah Hosseini, Hoda Helmy, Wafa Lakhdhar and Ahmed Serag

• Tool Calling for Arabic LLMs: Data Strategies and Instruction Tuning
  Asım Ersoy, Enes Altinisik, Kareem Mohamed Darwish and Husrev Taha Sencar

• An Exploration of Knowledge Editing for Arabic
  Basel Mousi, Nadir Durrani and Fahim Dalvi

• AutoArabic: A Three-Stage Framework for Localizing Video-Text Retrieval Benchmarks
  Mohamed Eltahir, Osamah Sarraj, Abdulrahman M. Alfrihidi, Taha Alshatiri, Mohammed Khurd, Mohammed Bremoo and Tanveer Hussain

• Open-domain Arabic Conversational Question Answering with Question Rewriting
  Mariam E. Hassib, Nagwa El-Makky and Marwan Torki

• DialG2P: Dialectal Grapheme-to-Phoneme. Arabic as a Case Study
  Majd Hawasly, Hamdy Mubarak, Ahmed Abdelali and Ahmed Ali 

• The Cross-Lingual Cost: Retrieval Biases in RAG over Arabic-English Corpora
  Chen Amiraz, Yaroslav Fyodorov, Elad Haramaty, Zohar Karnin and Liane Lewin-Eytan

(17:00 - 18:00) - Shared Task Papers (Posters)

Sunday November 9

(8:30 - 8:45) Welcome Note

(8:45 - 09:30) Invited Talk by Areeb Alowisheq: “From Benchmarks to the Real-World Impact: Arabic LLMs in Production”

(9:30 - 10:30) Panel Discussion: "Ethical Promise and Peril of LLMs"
  Panelists: Mohamed Ghaly and Fadi Zaraket
                          Moderator: Muhammad Abdul-Mageed

(10:30 - 11:00) Coffee Break

(11:00 - 12:30) Session 1: Education and Speech

Session Chair: Bashar Alhafni

• (11:00 - 11:15) - ArabJobs: A Multinational Corpus of Arabic Job Ads
  Mo El-Haj

• (11:15 - 11:30) - Feature Engineering is not Dead: A Step Towards State of the Art for Arabic Automated Essay Scoring
  Marwan Sayed, Sohaila Eltanbouly, May Bashendy and Tamer Elsayed

• (11:30 - 11:45) - Capturing Intra-Dialectal Variation in Qatari Arabic: A Corpus of Cultural and Gender Dimensions
  Houda Bouamor, Sara Al-Emadi, Zeinab Ibrahim, Hany Fazzaa and Aisha Al-Sultan

• (11:45 - 12:00) - TEDxTN: : Three-way Speech Translation Corpus for Code-Switched Tunisian Arabic - English
  Fethi Bougares, Salima Mdhaffar, Haroun Elleuch and Yannick Estève

• (12:00 - 12:15) - Octopus: Towards Building the Arabic Speech LLM Suite
  Sara Althubaiti, Vasista Sai Lodagala, Tjad Clark, Yousseif Ahmed Elshahawy, Daniel Izham, Abdullah Alrajeh, Aljawahrah Bin Tamran and Ahmed Ali

• (12:15 - 12:30) -  ArabEmoNet: A Lightweight Hybrid 2D CNN-BiLSTM Model with Attention for Robust Arabic Speech Emotion Recognition
  Ali Abouzeid, Bilal Elbouardi, Mohamed Maged and Shady Shehata

(12:30 - 14:00) - Lunch Break

(14:00 - 14:30) Session 2: Legal & Agents

Session Chair: Houda Bouamor

• (14:00 - 14:15) - ALARB: An Arabic Legal Argument Reasoning Benchmark
  Harethah Abu Shairah, Somayah S. Alharbi, Abdulaziz A. AlHussein, Sameer Alsabea, Omar Shaqaqi, Hebah A. Alshamlan, Omar Knio and George Turkiyyah 

• (14:15 - 14:30) - A-SEA3L-DU: An Fully Automated Self-Evolving, Adversarial Agentic Framework for Arabic Long-Context Document Understanding
  Kesen Wang, Daulet Toibazar and Pedro J Moreno Mengibar

(14:30 - 15:30) Arab Culture & Retrieval

Session Chair: Ahmed Abdelali

• (14:30 - 14:45) - Assessing Large Language Models on Islamic Legal Reasoning: Evidence from Inheritance Law Evaluation
  Abdessalam Bouchekif, Samer Rashwani, Heba Sbahi, Shahd Gaben, Mutaz Al Khatib and Mohammed Ghaly

• (14:45 - 15:00) - Toward Culturally-Aware Arabic Debate Platforms with NLP Support
  Khalid Al Khatib and Mohammad Khader 

• (15:00 - 15:15) - Can LLMs Directly Retrieve Passages for Answering Questions from Qur'an?
  Sohaila Eltanbouly, Salam Albatarni, Shaimaa Hassanein and Tamer Elsayed

• (15:15 - 15:30) - Shawarma Chats: A Benchmark Exact Dialogue & Evaluation Platter in Egyptian, Maghrebi & Modern Standard Arabic—A Triple-Dialect Feast for Hungry Language Models
  Kamyar Zeinalipour, Mohamed Zaky Saad, Oumaima Attafi, Marco Maggini and Marco Gori

(15:30 - 16:00) - Coffee Break

(16:00 - 17:00) Panel Discussion: "Is Classical NLP Dead?"
Panelists: Hamdy Mubarak, Mo Elhaj, and Fahim Dalvi
Moderator: Nizar Habash

Invited Talk (Nov 8): Beyond Resources: Building an Arabic NLP Ecosystem Rooted in Representation, Collaboration, and Responsibility

Speaker: Dr. Houda Bouamor, CMU Qatar

Invited Talk (Nov 9): From Benchmarks to the Real-World Impact: Arabic LLMs in Production

Speaker: Dr. Areeb Alowisheq, HUMAIN

(9:30 - 10:30) Panel Discussion: "Is Classical NLP Dead?"

• Fahim Dalvi is a Senior Software Engineer at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), where he works at the intersection of research and real-world applications. As part of the Arabic Language Technologies team, his work focuses on Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning, spanning areas such as machine translation, language modeling, model interpretability, and deployment of AI systems in practical settings.

• Hamdy Mubarak is a Principal Software Engineer at the Qatar Computing Research Institute of Hamad Bin Khalifa University.  He joined QCRI in 2014 and has participated in building state-of-the-art tools for processing the standard, classical, and dialectal varieties of Arabic (farasa.qcri.org), QATS Speech Transcription and Translation (qats.qcri.org and st.qcri.org), IYAS Question Answering, and Fake News Detection (tanbih.org) projects in addition to leading the efforts in analyzing social media texts (asad.qcri.org). He works on different aspects of the Arabic LLM, Fanar.

• Mo Elhaj is the Director of the VinUniversity NLP Research Group and a Reader (Associate Professor) in NLP at VinUniversity, currently serving as a visiting professor at Lancaster University. His research focuses on summarization, information extraction, financial NLP, and multilingual NLP, particularly for under-resourced languages such as Arabic, Igbo, Vietnamese and Welsh.

• Nizar Habash is a Professor of Computer Science at NYU Abu Dhabi and director of the CAMeL Lab, specializing in Arabic natural language processing. He has over 300 publications and has received major awards, including the King Salman Academy for Arabic Language Award (2022) and the Antonio Zampolli Prize (2024).

(16:00 - 17:00) Panel Discussion: "Ethical Promise and Peril of LLMs"

• Fadi Zaraket is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the American University of Beirut. His research spans automated reasoning for program correctness—formal methods, static analysis, model checking, and logic synthesis—and information extraction from Arabic and medical documents, through AUB’s Program Correctness Automation Lab (PCALab) and Computational Linguistics and Information Extraction Lab (CLIELab).

• Mohamed Ghaly is Professor of Islam and Biomedical Ethics and Head of the Research Center for Islamic Legislation & Ethics (CILE) at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), Qatar. He holds a BA from Al-Azhar University and both an MA and a PhD in Islamic Studies from Leiden University, where he was a faculty member from 2007 to 2013.

• Muhammad Abdul-Mageed is a Canada Research Chair in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning and Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia