Arabic NLP & Dialects
Datasets and models that understand Arabic as it's actually written online — across dialects, scripts, and code-switching.
- Dialect identification
- Low-resource NLP
- Arabizi
Currently: Visiting Fellow, Centre for Digital Society (2026–27)
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Associate Professor of Computational LinguisticsMashriq University, Amman
I study how Arabic-language media and AI systems shape what people come to believe — and I write about it for readers beyond the academy.
- Peer-reviewed papers
- 48
- Citations
- 3,200+
- h-index
- 24
- Essays & op-eds
- 120+
Research
Questions I work on
My work sits between computer science and the humanities: building tools for Arabic, and asking who they serve.
Misinformation & Media
How false claims spread across Arabic-language platforms, and why detection tools trained on English miss them.
- Fact-checking
- Network analysis
- Platform studies
AI Ethics & Governance
Auditing language technologies for bias, and shaping policy so the Arabic-speaking world isn't an afterthought.
- Algorithmic audits
- Content moderation
- Data governance
Digital Humanities & Archives
Computational methods for reading historical Arabic newspapers and preserving the region's born-digital record.
- OCR
- Web archiving
- Historical corpora
Writing
Recent articles & essays
Long-form pieces for readers beyond the academy.
Featured essayAI & Language
Why Arabic Dialects Still Break Most AI Models
More than 400 million people speak Arabic, but the Arabic most AI systems learn is one almost nobody speaks at home. That gap has consequences.
9 min read
Media & SocietyThe Anatomy of a Viral Falsehood
We traced a single false health claim across 340 group chats. Its journey reveals why fact-checks so often arrive too late.
7 min read
- Digital Heritage
Who Gets to Build the Arabic Internet's Memory?
Entire chapters of the region's recent history lived on blogs and forums that no longer exist. Deciding what to save is a political act.
8 min read
- Media & Society
A Field Guide to Reading AI Research Headlines
“AI outperforms doctors.” “Model understands language.” Five questions to ask before you share the next breakthrough.
6 min read
Publications
Selected publications
Recent peer-reviewed work. The full list is searchable on the research page.
2026
Journal articleDialect-Aware Misinformation Detection for Arabic Social Media
L. Haddad, O. Nasser, J. Kim
Journal of Computational Media Studies, 12(2)
DOICited by 41Misinformation classifiers for Arabic are overwhelmingly trained on Modern Standard Arabic, yet most viral claims circulate in dialect. We introduce a benchmark of 38,000 fact-checked claims across nine dialect groups and show that dialect-aware pre-training reduces false negatives by 31% relative to strong multilingual baselines.
2025
Conference paperBest PaperLAHJA: A Consent-Based Corpus of Everyday Written Arabic
L. Haddad, S. Benali, R. Aziz, M. Farouk
Proceedings of the Arabic NLP Conference (ArabicNLP 2025)
DOICited by 87We describe the design and first release of LAHJA, a 12-million-word corpus of dialectal Arabic contributed by 4,100 volunteers with explicit, revocable consent. We detail our collection protocol, annotation scheme, and baseline results for dialect identification and sentiment analysis.
2025
Journal articleالتحيّز اللهجي في النماذج اللغوية الكبيرة: دراسة تجريبية على خمس لهجات عربية
ل. حدّاد، ع. الخطيب
مجلة اللسانيات العربية الحاسوبية، المجلد 7، العدد 1
DOICited by 23تقيس هذه الدراسة أداء خمسة نماذج لغوية كبيرة على مهام الفهم والتوليد بخمس لهجات عربية، وتُظهر فجوة في الأداء تصل إلى 24 نقطة بين الفصحى واللهجات المغاربية. نقترح إطارًا للتقييم العادل بين اللهجات ونناقش أثره على الخدمات الرقمية الحكومية.
2024
Conference paperAuditing Content Moderation in Arabic: Evidence from Three Platforms
L. Haddad, T. Ofori, D. Mansour
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Fairness in Computing (FairComp '24)
DOICited by 112Using 60,000 paired posts, we measure how automated moderation systems treat equivalent content written in English, Modern Standard Arabic, and Levantine Arabic. Dialectal posts were removed at 2.3× the rate of their English equivalents, with disproportionate impact on news and advocacy accounts.
Essays and commentary have appeared in
- The Levant Review
- Meridian Magazine
- Policy Quarterly
- The Open Archive
- Signal & Noise
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