Papers by Houda Bouamor
LAILA: A Large Trait-Based Dataset for Arabic Automated Essay Scoring (2026.eacl-long)
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May Bashendy, Walid Massoud, Sohaila Eltanbouly, Salam Albatarni, Marwan Sayed, Abrar Abir, Houda Bouamor, Tamer Elsayed
| Challenge: | Existing Arabic resources are small in scale and lack trait-specific annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use LAILA to build a large Arabic AES dataset with holistic and trait-specific annotations of seven writing proficiency traits. |
| Outcome: | The LAILA dataset comprises 7,859 essays annotated with holistic and trait-specific scores on seven dimensions: relevance, organization, vocabulary, style, development, mechanics, and grammar. |
The Arabic Parallel Gender Corpus 2.0: Extensions and Analyses (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Gender bias in natural language processing (NLP) applications has been receiving increasing attention, largely due to the lack of datasets and resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a corpus for gender identification and rewriting in contexts involving one or two target users with independent grammatical gender preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus expands on Habash et al.'s Arabic Parallel Gender Corpus (APGC) by adding second person targets and increasing the total number of sentences over 6.5 times, reaching over 590K words. |
The MADAR Arabic Dialect Corpus and Lexicon (L18-1)
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Houda Bouamor, Nizar Habash, Mohammad Salameh, Wajdi Zaghouani, Owen Rambow, Dana Abdulrahim, Ossama Obeid, Salam Khalifa, Fadhl Eryani, Alexander Erdmann, Kemal Oflazer
| Challenge: | Using a corpus of 25 Arabic city dialects and a lexicon of 1,045 concepts, we study 25 cities in a travel domain . focus on cities opens new avenues for research from dialectology to dialect identification and machine translation. |
| Approach: | They present two Arabic language resources that are part of the Multi Arabic Dialect Applications and Resources project. |
| Outcome: | The proposed resources are the first of their kind in terms of their coverage and fine granularity. |
Toward Global AI Inclusivity: A Large-Scale Multilingual Terminology Dataset (GIST) (2025.findings-acl)
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Jiarui Liu, Iman Ouzzani, Wenkai Li, Lechen Zhang, Tianyue Ou, Houda Bouamor, Zhijing Jin, Mona T. Diab
| Challenge: | Despite advances in machine translation, domain-specific terminology translation remains challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale multilingual AI terminology dataset that combines LLMs for extraction with human expertise for translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework combines human translation expertise with LLMs to improve translation accuracy and improve BLEU and COMET scores. |
User-Centric Gender Rewriting (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that embed and amplify gender bias can still exhibit and exacerbate this problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-step system that combines the positive aspects of rule-based and neural rewriting models to provide personalized outputs based on the users’ grammatical gender preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves 88.42 M2 F0.5 on a blind test set and improves over previous work on the first-person-only version of this task by 3.05 absolute increase in M2F0.5. |
Cross-Lingual Transfer from Related Languages: Treating Low-Resource Maltese as Multilingual Code-Switching (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual models exhibit impressive cross-lingual transfer capabilities on unseen languages, but performance is impacted when there is a script disparity with the languages used in the model’s pre-training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel method to align a resource-rich language's script with a target language and train a classifier that can make informed decisions regarding the appropriate processing of each token. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to transfer a language's scripts across multiple languages, but it is suboptimal for mixed languages, where only a subset benefits while the rest is impeded. |
Unified Guidelines and Resources for Arabic Dialect Orthography (L18-1)
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Nizar Habash, Fadhl Eryani, Salam Khalifa, Owen Rambow, Dana Abdulrahim, Alexander Erdmann, Reem Faraj, Wajdi Zaghouani, Houda Bouamor, Nasser Zalmout, Sara Hassan, Faisal Al-Shargi, Sakhar Alkhereyf, Basma Abdulkareem, Ramy Eskander, Mohammad Salameh, Hind Saddiki
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to conventionalize the dialectal orthography of Arabic have focused on specific dialects and made ad hoc decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose a set of guidelines and meta-guidelines for conventional orthography of Arabic dialects . they apply them to 28 Arab city dialects from Rabat to Muscat . |
| Outcome: | The proposed guidelines and resources are being used by three large Arabic dialect processing projects in three universities. |
MADARi: A Web Interface for Joint Arabic Morphological Annotation and Spelling Correction (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | Standard Arabic morphology is rich, but Arabic dialects introduce more complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint morphological annotation and spelling correction system for Arabic texts . they propose morphology tools that can be used to help with productivity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is based on a standard and dialectal Arabic text. |
Hierarchical Aggregation of Dialectal Data for Arabic Dialect Identification (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Previous work on Arabic Dialect identification focused on specific dialect levels and labels . since dialectal differences tend to be more subtle relative terms to language differences, the DID task is harder than language identification. |
| Approach: | They propose to define a standard hierarchical schema for Arabic Dialect identification . they map 29 different data sets to this schema and use it to aggregate the data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed schemas and methods are extensible to other languages and dialect groups. |
Fine-Grained Arabic Dialect Identification (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on Arabic Dialect Identification typically targeted coarse-grained five dialect classes plus Standard Arabic at most (6-way classification). |
| Approach: | They propose to tackle a fine-grained Arabic dialect classification task covering 25 cities from across the Arab World, in addition to Standard Arabic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can identify the exact city of a speaker at an accuracy of 67.9% for sentences with an average length of 7 words and reach more than 90% when we consider 16 words. |
ADIDA: Automatic Dialect Identification for Arabic (N19-4)
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| Challenge: | Demo paper describes a web-based system for automatic dialect identification for Arabic text. |
| Approach: | They present a web-based system for automatic dialect identification for Arabic text that distinguishes between 25 Arab cities and Modern Standard Arabic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system distinguishes among the dialects of 25 Arab cities (from Rabat to Muscat) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). |
TartanMaroon: Multi-Agent Academic Advising with Iterative Negotiation and Transparent Collaboration (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Academic advising is a critical yet resourceintensive component of higher education . monolithic model must simultaneously maintain awareness of heterogeneous institutional constraints . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent academic advising system that handles the full complexity spectrum of student queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system handles the full complexity spectrum of student queries . it also provides a real-time transparency interface streaming agent reasoning and negotiation rounds to users . the system is released open-source and has been rated highly by users based on their results . |
A Spelling Correction Corpus for Multiple Arabic Dialects (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Arabic dialects are non-standard varieties of Arabic commonly spoken across the Arab world, but lack standard orthographies. |
| Approach: | They present a corpus of 10,000 sentences from five Arabic city dialects represented in the Conventional Orthography for Dialectal Arabic (CODA) they use a bootstrapping technique to speed up annotation and compare similarity between dialects before and after CODA annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method speeds up the annotation process and shows similarity between the dialects before and after CODA annotation. |