NLP 8505

Arabic Natural Language Processing

Lectures

Monday: 3:00pm - 4:30pm, Classroom 6

Wednesday: 3:00pm - 4:30pm, Lecture Hall 2

Course Description

This course offers an in-depth introduction to Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP), focusing on the unique challenges presented by Arabic as a computational object of study. Students will learn about core enabling technologies for NLP with a strong focus on the Arabic language and its dialects. The course will include text normalization, morphological analysis, syntactic parsing, and semantic analysis. The course will integrate theory and hands-on experience, including applied deep learning techniques and practical applications like machine translation, sentiment analysis, and more. By the end of the course, students will be equipped to contribute to advancements in Arabic NLP research and development.

Topics

This course combines theoretical foundations with applied practice, organized around the core components of Arabic NLP. The main topics include:

  • Arabic Script and Orthography: Principles of the writing system and orthographic variation.
  • Tokenization: Fundamentals of word segmentation for Arabic.
  • Arabic Morphology: Morphological structure and processes; computational analysis, generation, and disambiguation methods.
  • Dialect Modeling: Representing and processing dialectal Arabic.
  • Arabic Resources: Corpora and tools.
  • Applications in Arabic NLP: Readability modeling, grammatical error correction, and text rewriting as case studies of end-to-end systems.

Supplemental Material

Grading

Percentage Assessment Component
25% Assignment 1
25% Assignment 2
50% Course Project:
– Team and Project Declaration (10%)
– Project Related Work and Methodology (10%)
– Final Report (30%)

Schedule

Week 1

March 2: Introduction to Arabic NLP, history, challenges
March 4: Arabic Script and Orthography

Week 2

March 23: Morphological Structure, Analysis and Generation
March 25: Morphological Disambiguation

Week 3

April 1: Arabic Dialect Modeling 1
April 2: Arabic Dialect Modeling 2

Week 4

April 6: Arabic Syntactic Analysis – Guest Lecture (Prof. Nizar Habash)
April 8: Educational ArabicNLP

Week 5

April 13: Projects Presentations
April 15: Projects Presentations

Week 6

April 20: Bias and Ethics
April 22: Current Trends and Outlook

Week 8

April 27:
  • Projects Due