This workshop introduces the basics of Arabic text processing. The workshop consists of two parts. We first introduce the basic challenges and common tasks associated with Arabic natural language processing. We then present CamelTools, a Python Open-Source toolkit for Arabic processing that addresses the challenges and targets the tasks. The second part of the workshop will be hands-on and introduces general Python text processing utilities, CamelTools utilities for transliteration, normalization, morphological analysis and disambiguation, named-entity recognition, dialect identification and sentiment analysis.

Note: Participants should have access to COLAB, with 3.0GB available on Google Drive for running interactively (needs a gmail account). Participants should have some skills in programming (Jupyter notebooks, Python, command line, etc.). Arabic literacy is not necessary, but obviously helpful.