Publications

2026

  1. EMNLP
    When Similar Means Different: Evaluating LLMs on Arabic–Hebrew Cognates
    Junhong Liang, Noor Abo Mokh, and Bashar Alhafni
    In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper Code
  2. EMNLP
    Arabic Morphosyntactic Tagging and Dependency Parsing with Large Language Models
    Mohamed Adel, Bashar Alhafni, and Nizar Habash
    In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper
  3. Findings (EMNLP)
    Arabic Sentence Segmentation Across Genres and Punctuation Conditions
    Mohammed Elkholy, Khalid N. Elmadani, Nizar Habash, and Bashar Alhafni
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper Code
  4. ArabicNLP
    From Subwords to Pixels: Evaluating Text Representations for Arabic Machine Translation
    Abdelrahman Shaheen, Mohamed Abbas, Tereza Truckova, Yova Kementchedjhieva, and Bashar Alhafni
    In Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Code
  5. BEA
    Opportunities and Challenges of LLMs in Education: An NLP Perspective
    Sowmya Vajjala, Bashar Alhafni, Stefano Bannò, Kaushal Kumar Maurya, and Ekaterina Kochmar
    In Proceedings of the 21st Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2026), San Diego, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper
  6. LREC
    A Bilingual Bimodal Benchmark for Arabic-English NLP Across Grammatical Correction, Essay Scoring, Morphological Tagging, and Speech Recognition
    Bashar Alhafni, Injy Hamed, Fadhl Eryani, David Palfreyman, and Nizar Habash
    In Proceedings of the Sixteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Mallorca, Spain. European Language Resources Association.
    Paper Data
  7. LREC
    Benchmarking Arabic Authorship Attribution and Style Transfer with Large Language Models
    Injy Hamed, Bashar Alhafni, Nizar Habash, and Thamar Solorio
    In Proceedings of the Sixteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Mallorca, Spain. European Language Resources Association.
    Paper Code
  8. VarDial
    MBZUAI at AMIYA Shared Task 2026: Adapting Open-Source LLMs for Dialectal Arabic 🏆
    Rana Gaber, Yara Allam, Serag Amin, Ranwa Aly, and Bashar Alhafni
    In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, pages 373–384, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper
  9. EACL
    A Tale of Two Scripts: Transliteration and Post-Correction for Judeo-Arabic
    Juan Moreno Gonzalez, Bashar Alhafni, and Nizar Habash
    In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2100–2113, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper Code
  10. Findings (EACL)
    Do Diacritics Matter? Evaluating the Impact of Arabic Diacritics on Tokenization and LLM Benchmarks
    Go Inoue, Bashar Alhafni, Nizar Habash, and Timothy Baldwin
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026, pages 426–442, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper Code

2025

  1. ACL
    Enhancing Text Editing for Grammatical Error Correction: Arabic as a Case Study
    Bashar Alhafni and Nizar Habash
    In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 17892–17914, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper Code
  2. ArabicNLP
    BAREC Shared Task 2025 on Arabic Readability Assessment
    Khalid N. Elmadani, Bashar Alhafni, Hanada Taha, and Nizar Habash
    In Proceedings of The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks, pages 239–252, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper Website
  3. ArabicNLP
    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
    In Proceedings of The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference, pages 162–178, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper
  4. ArabicNLP
    BALSAM: A Platform for Benchmarking Arabic Large Language Models
    Rawan Nasser Almatham, Kareem Mohamed Darwish, Raghad Al-Rasheed, Waad Thuwaini Alshammari, Muneera Alhoshan, Amal Almazrua, Asma Al Wazrah, Mais Alheraki, Firoj Alam, Preslav Nakov, and 33 more authors
    In Proceedings of The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference, pages 258–277, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper Website
  5. BEA
    Enhancing Arabic Automated Essay Scoring with Synthetic Data and Error Injection
    Chatrine Qwaider, Bashar Alhafni, Kirill Chirkunov, Nizar Habash, and Ted Briscoe
    In Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2025), pages 549–563, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper
  6. In2Writing
    ARWI: Arabic Write and Improve 🏆
    Kirill Chirkunov, Bashar Alhafni, Chatrine Qwaider, Nizar Habash, and Ted Briscoe
    In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants (In2Writing 2025), pages 11–18, Albuquerque, New Mexico, US. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper Demo
  7. arXiv
    Global PIQA: Evaluating Physical Commonsense Reasoning Across 100+ Languages and Cultures
    Tyler A. Chang, Catherine Arnett, Abdelrahman Eldesokey, Abdelrahman Sadallah, Abeer Kashar, Abolade Daud, Abosede Grace Olanihun, Adamu Labaran Mohammed, Adeyemi Praise, Adhikarinayum Meerajita Sharma, and 328 more authors
    arXiv preprint
    Paper

2024

  1. ArabicNLP
    Exploiting Dialect Identification in Automatic Dialectal Text Normalization
    Bashar Alhafni, Sarah Al-Towaity, Ziyad Fawzy, Fatema Nassar, Fadhl Eryani, Houda Bouamor, and Nizar Habash
    In Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference, pages 42–54, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper
  2. ArabicNLP
    Strategies for Arabic Readability Modeling
    Juan Liberato, Bashar Alhafni, Muhamed Khalil, and Nizar Habash
    In Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference, pages 55–66, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper
  3. LREC-COLING
    The SAMER Arabic Text Simplification Corpus
    Bashar Alhafni, Reem Hazim, Juan David Pineros Liberato, Muhamed Al Khalil, and Nizar Habash
    In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 16079–16093, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
    Paper
  4. NAACL
    mEdIT: Multilingual Text Editing via Instruction Tuning
    Vipul Raheja, Dimitris Alikaniotis, Vivek Kulkarni, Bashar Alhafni, and Dhruv Kumar
    In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 979–1001, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper
  5. Personalize
    Personalized Text Generation with Fine-Grained Linguistic Control
    Bashar Alhafni, Vivek Kulkarni, Dhruv Kumar, and Vipul Raheja
    In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Personalization of Generative AI Systems (PERSONALIZE 2024), pages 88–101, St. Julians, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper

2023

  1. EMNLP
    Advancements in Arabic Grammatical Error Detection and Correction: An Empirical Investigation
    Bashar Alhafni, Go Inoue, Christian Khairallah, and Nizar Habash
    In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6430–6448, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper
  2. GITT
    The User-Aware Arabic Gender Rewriter
    Bashar Alhafni, Ossama Obeid, and Nizar Habash
    In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Gender-Inclusive Translation Technologies, pages 3–11, Tampere, Finland. European Association for Machine Translation.
    Paper Demo

2022

  1. Findings (EMNLP)
    CrisisLTLSum: A Benchmark for Local Crisis Event Timeline Extraction and Summarization
    Hossein Rajaby Faghihi, Bashar Alhafni, Ke Zhang, Shihao Ran, Joel Tetreault, and Alejandro Jaimes
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 5455–5477, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper
  2. EMNLP
    Arabic Word-level Readability Visualization for Assisted Text Simplification
    Reem Hazim, Hind Saddiki, Bashar Alhafni, Muhamed Al Khalil, and Nizar Habash
    In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 242–249, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper Demo
  3. INLG
    Zero-shot Cross-Linguistic Learning of Event Semantics
    Malihe Alikhani, Thomas Kober, Bashar Alhafni, Yue Chen, Mert Inan, Elizabeth Nielsen, Shahab Raji, Mark Steedman, and Matthew Stone
    In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, pages 212–224, Waterville, Maine, USA and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper
  4. WANLP
    The Shared Task on Gender Rewriting
    Bashar Alhafni, Nizar Habash, Houda Bouamor, Ossama Obeid, Sultan Alrowili, Daliyah AlZeer, Kawla Mohmad Shnqiti, Ahmed Elbakry, Muhammad ElNokrashy, Mohamed Gabr, and 4 more authors
    In Proceedings of the Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (WANLP), pages 98–107, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper
  5. NAACL
    User-Centric Gender Rewriting
    Bashar Alhafni, Nizar Habash, and Houda Bouamor
    In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 618–631, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper
  6. LREC
    The Arabic Parallel Gender Corpus 2.0: Extensions and Analyses
    Bashar Alhafni, Nizar Habash, and Houda Bouamor
    In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 1870–1884, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
    Paper

2021

  1. WANLP
    The Interplay of Variant, Size, and Task Type in Arabic Pre-trained Language Models
    Go Inoue, Bashar Alhafni, Nurpeiis Baimukan, Houda Bouamor, and Nizar Habash
    In Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, pages 92–104, Kyiv, Ukraine (Virtual). Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper

2020

  1. GeBNLP
    Gender-Aware Reinflection using Linguistically Enhanced Neural Models
    Bashar Alhafni, Nizar Habash, and Houda Bouamor
    In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing, pages 139–150, Barcelona, Spain (Online). Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper
  2. LREC
    CAMeL Tools: An Open Source Python Toolkit for Arabic Natural Language Processing
    Ossama Obeid, Nasser Zalmout, Salam Khalifa, Dima Taji, Mai Oudah, Bashar Alhafni, Go Inoue, Fadhl Eryani, Alexander Erdmann, and Nizar Habash
    In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 7022–7032, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
    Paper

2019

  1. WNU
    Contextualized Word Embeddings Enhanced Event Temporal Relation Extraction for Story Understanding
    Rujun Han, Mengyue Liang, Bashar Alhafni, and Nanyun Peng
    In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Narrative Understanding, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
    Paper