Nakba-NLP 2025

The narratives of the (ongoing) Palestinian Nakba possess significant historical, cultural, literary, and academic value. Preserving this content and empowring it with AI tools is crucial for ensuring its accessibility and usability for present and future generations. Nakba narratives and testimonies exist in diverse formats such as manuscripts, books, audio recordings, novels, and films. Converting this content into a machine-understandable format presents a notable challenge. Establishing accessible archives and well-annotated collections is essential for researchers and historians to verify and share meaningful information.

This workshop aims to explore how artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and corpus linguistics can assist in understanding, disseminating and preserving, Nakba narratives and testimonies. The goal is to create accessible, comprehensive, and well-annotated collections that empower researchers and historians to validate and share critical insights derived from these data. The workshop targets datasets and narratives in Arabic, English, and other languages, however, submitted articles should be written in English.

We invite submissions for Nakba-NLP 2025, a workshop dedicated to the exploration and preservation of Nakba narratives through the application of artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and corpus linguistics. All submitted papers should explain their relevance to the topic of ‘Nakba Narratives as Language Resources’. The organisers reserve the right to reject any papers that incite hatred, refute established facts, or undermine the suffering of individuals.

We seek contributions on the following issues of interest:

• Digitisation of oral and written narratives
• Creation and labeling of language corpora and datasets
• Digital archives, metadata, and semantic/content mark-up
• Annotation tools and annotation guidelines
• Document classification, topic modeling, and information retrieval
• Named entity recognition for identifying people, places, organizations, and events
• Entity linking and relationship extraction
• Event detection and event argument extraction
• Knowledge Graphs and Linked Data
• Vocabularies, dictionaries, and ontologies
• Data visualisation
• Knowledge representation
• Machine translation, summarisation, and paraphrasing
• Natural Language Generation
• Large Language Models
• Sentiment analysis and emotional content extraction
• Discourse analysis (e.g., bias, offensive language, and misinformation) related to Nakba narratives
• Voice & dialogue-based systems; ASR
• Palestinian dialects (written and spoken)

Participants are invited to use the following archives: Institute for Palestine Studies, The Palestinian Museum, Nakba-Archive, POHA,Alhaq,ICHR, as well as Wikipedia and the Wikidata Knowledge Graph.

All submitted papers must clearly state and explain their relevance to the topic of ‘Nakba Narratives as Language Resources’. The organisers reserve the right to reject any papers that incite hatred, refute established facts, or undermine the suffering of individuals.

Submissions may be of two types:

• Long papers – up to eight (8) pages maximum, presenting substantial, original, completed, and unpublished work.
• Short papers – up to four (4) pages, describing a small focused contribution, negative results, system demonstrations, etc.

• Submission Deadline: 25 November 2024 28 November 2024
• Notifications of Acceptance: 5 December 2024
• Camera Ready Deadline: 13 December 2024 (cannot be changed).

In this talk, I will examine the Zionist language employed both for domestic and external consumption during the 1948 Nakba and the present genocide of Gaza. This language and its basic vocabulary shielded Israel for many years from internal criticism and international condemnation and granted it Western impunity.

This vocabulary represented a twin process of dehumanization and militarization of the Palestinian civil space. The reference to villages and towns as military bases at best, or as terrorist hotbeds at worst, was an important part of the indoctrination of the Israeli troops as well as a crucial aspect of the Israeli Hasbara, propaganda, outside.

This vocabulary should be seen as an eliminatory praxis by Israel and before that by the Zionist state. A verbal elimination indeed preceded the actual attempted one in 1948. The early attempt was to expunge the Palestinians as people of the land from history and memory before perpetrating a massive expulsion in 1948. The eliminatory vocabulary continued to be employed during the Nakba and ever since 1948. One the most worrying aspects of the current phase of the ongoing Nakba is the sense that manipulation of language is not needed anymore and the eliminatory polices are presented as such in the most vile and direct manner. But it is noteworthy that the direct approach is done only in Hebrew, which Israeli policy makers, treat still as a secret language only they understand.

Resisting this eliminatory praxis, common among settler colonial movements in the past, highlights the importance, quite often belittled, of scholarship, professional acumen, wordsmanship and articulation in any language that can reach a wider audiences, who can be part of a solidarity movement or in position to make a difference on the ground. Also the slow process of introducing the counter vocabulary to the Israeli Jewish society, as done by Zochrot, should be acknowledged. None of these efforts is just about words or language, or even discourse. They have to be contextualized historically, legally and morally to appreciate how close they bring us to the adage: the word is [can be at least] mightier than the sword.

• Abdelkader El Mahdaouy, Mohamed VI polytechnic University
• Abdellah El Mekki, School of Computer Sciences, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University
• Abdelrahim Qaddoumi, NYU
• Abdulrahman Abdulsalam, University of Utah
• Abed Alhakim Freihat, University of Trento
• Adnan Yahya, Birzeit University
• Ala Alazzeh, Birzeit University
• Ali AlKhathlan, Assistant Professor King Abdulaziz University
• Almoataz B. Al-Said, Cairo University
• Amr Keleg, The University of Edinburgh
• Areej Jaber, Technical University Khadouri
• Ashraf Elnagar, University of Sharjah
• Ayah Soufan, Strathclyde University
• Azzeddine Mazroui, University Mohammed First, Faculty of Sciences
• Badr AlKhamissi, EPFL
• Baker Abdalhaq, Annajah National University
• Basem Ezbidi, Birzeit university
• Bassam Haddad, University of Petra
• Bayan AbuShawar, Associate Professor-Cyber security Department-Al Ain University
• Dana Abdulrahim, University of Bahrain
• Dima Taji, Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics
• ElMoatez Billah Nagoudi, The University of British Columbia
• Eyad Elyan, Robert Gordon University
• Fadhl Eryani, University of Tübingen
• Fadi Zaraket, American University of Beirut
• Faisal Awartani, Insights for Research Polling and Training
• Fatemah Husain, Kuwait University
• Fatima Haouari, Qatar University
• Fethi Bougares, LIUM- Le Mans Université
• Fouzi Harrag, Ferhat Abbas University
• Ghassan Mourad, libanese university
• Go Inoue, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
• Habiba Dahmani, Mohamed Boudiaf University
• Haithem Afli, ADAPT Centre, Munster Technological University
• Hamada Nayel, Benha University
• Ibrahim Abu Farha, University of Sheffield
• Imed Zitouni, Google
• Imene Bensalem, ESCF de Constantine & MISC Lab, Constantine 2 University, Algeria
• Injy Hamed, Institute for Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart
• Kamel Gaanoun, National Institute of Statistics and Applied Economics
• Kamel Smaili, LORIA
• Kaoukab Chebaro, Columbia University
• Karim Bouzoubaa, Mohammed V University in Rabat
• Khaled Shaalan, The British University in Dubai
• Khalid Choukri, ELRA/ELDA
• Khalil Mrini, Bytedance
• Khloud Al Jallad, SySSR
• Labib Arafeh, AlQuds University
• Lama Nachman, Intel Labs
• Lamia Hadrich-Belguith, ANLP Research Group, MIRACL Lab, FSEGS, Sfax University
• Majdi Sawalha, The University of Jordan
• Manar Alkhatib, British University in Dubai
• Maram Hasanain, Qatar Computing Research Institute
• Mo El-Haj, Lancaster University
• Mohamed Lichouri, Centre de Recherche Scientifique et Technique pour le Développement de la Langue Arabe (CRSTDLA)
• Mohamed Yahya, NLP Researcher
• Mohammad Abuoudeh, Al Hussein Bin Talal University
• Mohammed Attia, Google Inc.
• Mohammed Khalilia, Birzeit University
• Mohammed Salah Al-Radhi, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics
• Mona Baker, University of Oslo
• Moustafa Al-Hajj, Lebanese University
• Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, The University of British Columbia
• Munir Fakher Eldin, Birzeit University
• Munther Dahleh, MIT
• Nada Ghneim, Damascus University - Information Technology Engineering Faculty
• Omar Shehabi, Yale Law School
• Omar Tesdell, Birzeit University
• Omar Trigui, University of Sousse in Tunisia
• Owen Rambow, Stony Brook University
• Radi Jarrar, Birzeit University
• Radwan Tahboub, Palestine Polytechnic University
• Raia Abu Ahmad, DFKI
• Reem Suwaileh, Qatar University
• Saad Ezzini, Lancaster University
• Sabri Boughorbel, Qatar Computing Research Institute
• Sahar Ghannay, CNRS, LISN
• Salima Harrat, ENS Bouzaréah, Algiers
• salima mdhaffar, LIA - University of Avignon
• Samhaa R. El-Beltagy, Newgiza University/Optomatica
• Sari Hanafi, American Univ of Beirut
• Seif Mechti, ISSEPS
• Serin Atiani, Princess Sumaya University for Technology
• Shady Elbassuoni, American University of Beirut
• Sultan Alrowili, University of Delaware
• Susan Akram, Boston University
• Tamer Elsayed, Qatar University
• Thaher Gharabeh, Univeristy of Granada
• Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, Al Akhawayn University
• Wajdi Zaghouani, Northwestern University Qatar
• Walid Magdy, The University of Edinburgh
• Wassim El-Hajj, American University of Beirut
• Watheq Mansour, The University of Queensland
• Wissam Antoun, Inria
• Yahya Mohamed Elhadj, Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies