Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q) faculty member, Houda Bouamor, was one of the key organizers and presenters at the inaugural Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) Winter School in Abu Dhabi. The two-day session took place concurrently with COLING 2025, a top-ranked international conference in NLP. The session was organized by SIGARAB, a special interest group of the Association for Computational Linguistics for researchers of Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP). 

An expert in Arabic NLP, Bouamor is the CMU-Q’s associate area head and associate teaching professor of information systems. She also serves as secretary of SIGARAB.

The Winter School addresses the unique challenges of Arabic NLP for practitioners in both industry and academia. Unlike monolithic languages, Arabic’s complex morphology, inherent ambiguity, and diverse dialects present significant obstacles to effective computational processing. As one of the six official languages of the United Nations and spoken by more than 400 million people worldwide, Arabic NLP has the potential to unlock vast opportunities across the Arab world and globally.

Bouamor led several sessions during the workshop, including an introduction to Arabic NLP resources and tools and a discussion about starting and excelling in Arabic NLP.