Nakba-NLP 2026

Overview

The narratives of the (ongoing) Palestinian Nakba possess significant historical, cultural, literary, and academic value. Preserving this content and empowering 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.

Call for Papers

We invite contributions on all aspects of building and applying language resources for Nakba narratives, including but not limited to:

Digitisation of oral and written materials
Corpus creation, annotation, and datasets
Digital archives, metadata, and mark-up
Annotation tools and standards
Classification, retrieval, & topic modelling
Entity recognition, & relation extraction
Event & argument extraction
Knowledge graphs, ontologies, and linked data
Machine translation
Summarisation, and paraphrasing
Language generation and large language models
Sentiment, stance, and emotion analysis
Bias, misinformation, and hate speech
Speech recognition and voice technologies
Palestinian dialects (spoken and written)

Participants are encouraged to draw on existing archives such as the Institute for Palestine Studies, the The Palestinian Museum, Nakba-Archive, POHA, Al-Haq, ICHR, as well as open resources like Wikipedia and Wikidata.

Submission Details

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.

We follow the LREC 2026 standards for submission format and guidelines, 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 URL: Please submit here.

Welcome Message from the Organizers

Welcome to the Nakba Narratives as Language Resources workshop!

This workshop explores how natural language processing (NLP) tools can contribute to the documentation and understanding of significant historical events. Similar to other initiatives such as the Holocaust Testimonies as Language Resources workshop at LREC-COLING 2024, we aim to examine the intersection of language, technology, and social good - an essential and growing area of research.

We recognize that topics like the Nakba may be viewed as sensitive or politically charged. However, addressing such issues is not unprecedented in NLP. Research on socially significant topics, including gender bias, propaganda, and historical testimonies, often intersects with political and cultural discourse. Such efforts are widely recognized as essential for advancing NLP as a field. Similarly, this workshop seeks to foster rigorous and inclusive exploration of narratives surrounding the Nakba.

We are committed to fostering an inclusive and respectful environment where diverse perspectives are welcomed and all opinions can be expressed and discussed in an academic and constructive manner. Open dialogue is at the heart of our approach, and we value thoughtful contributions from every participant. This workshop adheres to the Diversity, Inclusion, and Anti-Harassment Policy of LREC 2026.

Thank you for your participation. We look forward to a thoughtful and impactful workshop.

Best regards,
The Workshop Organizers

Organizers

Mustafa Jarrar

Birzeit University, Palestine

Mo El-Haj

Lancaster University, UK

Amal Haddad

University of Granada, Spain

Camille Mansour

Institute for Palestine Studies, Lebanon

Paul Rayson

Lancaster University, UK

Khalil Simaan

University of Amsterdam

Serin Atiani

Princess Sumaya University, Jordan

Shadi Abudalfa

King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals (KFUPM).

Program Committee

AbdelRahim A. Elmadany, University of British Columbia
Abed Alhakim Freihat, University of Trento
Ahmed Abdelali, Hamad Bin Khalifa University
Ahmed Ali, Qatar Computing Research Institute
Almoataz B. Al-Said, Cairo University
Aloulou Chafik, Université de Sfax
AmrKeleg, The University of Edinburgh
Bassam Haddad, University of Petra
Christian Khairallah, New York University
Dana Abdulrahim, University of Bahrain
Dima Taji, Charles University Prague
Fadi Zaraket, American University of Beirut
Firoj Alam, Qatar Computing Research Institute
Ghassan Mourad, Lebanese University
Hanan Aldarmaki, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
Houda Bouamor, Carnegie Mellon University
Ibrahim Abu Farha, University of Sheffield
Imene Bensalem, École Supérieure de Comptabilité et de Finances– Constantine
Injy Hamed, University of Stuttgart
Karim Bouzoubaa, Ecole Mohammadia d’Ingénieurs
Khaled Shaalan, British University in Dubai
Khaled Shaban, Qatar University
Lamia Belguith, FST, Tunis
Maram Hasanain, Qatar Computing Research Institute
Md Tawkat Islam Khondaker, University of British Columbia
Mohamed Lichouri, Université des Sciences et de la Technologie Houari Boumediène
Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, University of British Columbia
Nada Ghneim, Arab International University
Nadi Tomeh, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord
Omar Trigui, Institut Supérieur de Gestion de Sousse
ReemSuwaileh, Hamad Bin Khalifa University
Samia Touileb, University of Bergen
Taha Zerrouki, Bouira University, Algeria
Tamer Elsayed, Qatar University
Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane
Wajdi Zaghouani, Hamad Bin Khalifa University
Wassim El-Hajj, American University of Beirut
Wissam Antoun, INRIA

Shared Tasks

In addition to paper submissions, the workshop will host shared tasks designed to advance NLP research on Nakba narratives. Each shared task will be coordinated by a dedicated organising team, independent from the main workshop organisers.

NakbaVirality – an NLP task on predicting the virality of social media posts, focusing on the sensitive discourse surrounding the Nakba and the recent Israeli war on Gaza.
NakbaArchiver – an NLPclassification task to determine whether a text, image, or video is related to the Israeli war on Gaza.