Publications

2025

  1. 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. EMNLP, 2025
    PDF Website
  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. EMNLP, 2025
    PDF Website
  3. ArabicNLP
    Evaluating Prompt Relevance of Arabic Essays: 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. EMNLP, 2025
    PDF
  4. 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, 2025
    PDF Code
  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). ACL, 2025
    PDF
  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. NAACL, 2025
    PDF 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, 2025
    PDF
  8. arXiv
    Opportunities and Challenges of LLMs in Education: An NLP Perspective
    Sowmya Vajjala, Bashar Alhafni, Stefano Bannò, Kaushal Kumar Maurya, and Ekaterina Kochmar
    arXiv preprint, 2025
    PDF
  9. arXiv
    A Tale of Two Scripts: Transliteration and Post-Correction for Judeo-Arabic
    Juan Moreno Gonzalez, Bashar Alhafni, and Nizar Habash
    arXiv preprint, 2025
    PDF

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. ACL, 2024
    PDF Code
  2. ArabicNLP
    Strategies for Arabic Readability Modelling
    Juan Piñeros Liberato, Bashar Alhafni, Muhamed Al Khalil, and Nizar Habash
    In Proceedings of the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference. ACL, 2024
    PDF Code
  3. LREC-COLING
    The SAMER Arabic Text Simplification Corpus
    Bashar Alhafni, Reem Hazim, Juan Piñeros 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), 2024
    PDF
  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, 2024
    PDF Code
  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. EACL, 2024
    PDF Code

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, 2023
    PDF Code
  2. GITT
    The User-Aware Arabic Gender Rewriter
    Bashar Alhafni, Ossama Obeid, and Nizar Habash
    In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Gender-Inclusive Translation Technologies. EAMT, 2023
    PDF Demo

2022

  1. 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 Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Findings, 2022
    PDF Code
  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, 2022
    PDF Code Demo
  3. WANLP
    The Shared Task on Gender Rewriting
    Bashar Alhafni, Nizar Habash, Houda Bouamor, Ossama Obeid, Sultan Alrowili, Daliyah Alzeer, Khawlah Alshanqiti, Ahmed ElBakry, Muhammad ElNokrashy, Mohamed Gabr, and 4 more authors
    In Proceedings of the Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop. EMNLP, 2022
    PDF Website
  4. 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, 2022
    PDF Code
  5. LREC
    The Arabic Parallel Gender Corpus 2.0: Extensions and Analyses
    Bashar Alhafni, Nizar Habash, and Houda Bouamor
    In Proceedings of the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 2022
    PDF
  6. 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, 2022
    PDF

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 In Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop. EACL, 2021
    PDF Code

2020

  1. GeBNLP
    Gender-Aware Reinflection using Linguistically Enhanced Neural Models
    Bashar Alhafni, Nizar Habash, and Houda Bouamor
    In In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing. COLING, 2020
    PDF Code
  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 In Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 2020
    PDF Code

2019

  1. WNU
    Contextualized Word Embeddings Enhanced Event Temporal Relation Extraction for Story Understanding
    Rujun Han, Mengyue Liang, Bashar Alhafni, and Nanyun Peng
    In In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Narrative Understanding. NAACL, 2019
    PDF