Riyadh hosts forum on Arabic language computing

Abdullah Al-Washmi, secretary-general of the academy, delivers the speech at the conference in Riyadh. (Supplied)
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  • The event drew participants from local, regional, and international institutions, along with researchers from 22 countries
  • he conference aims to foster collaboration between computational experts and linguists

RIYADH: The King Salman Global Academy for Arabic Language launched its third international conference on Sunday in Riyadh, called “Arabic Language Computing and Linguistic Data Enrichment.”

The event drew participants from local, regional, and international institutions, along with researchers from 22 countries, who focused on computational linguistics, computer science, and the Arabic language.

The conference aims to foster collaboration between computational experts and linguists, bridging knowledge gaps and showcasing key projects in Arabic language computing.

It seeks to enrich Arabic language datasets to enhance artificial intelligence models and support Arabic language processing.

Abdullah Al-Washmi, the academy’s secretary-general, spoke of the need to improve academic practices in the Arab world and provide a platform for discussing challenges and opportunities in linguistic data quality and accessibility.

Topics include machine learning, speech-to-text conversion, and automated text recognition, as well as the use of computational linguistics in Arabic language learning, digital dictionary techniques, and linguistic corpus analysis.

Dr. Abdulaziz Al-Mahyobi, an associate professor of computational linguistics at Imam Mohammad ibn Saud Islamic University, said that research would result in more objective and precise language analysis results.

He noted that automation eliminated subjective guesswork, leading to reliable and verified outcomes.

Al-Mahyobi added that automating language processing could revolutionize machine translation, error detection, speech recognition, and text compression and indexing.

He said that Arabic’s structured morphological, syntactical, and lexical systems made it particularly suited for advanced digital processing.