The 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2025) has kicked off at Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre (ADNEC).
COLING 2025, hosted by Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), welcomes over 1,500 global attendees. Organized under the auspices of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL), the event will run till 24 January.
The edition will feature 22 workshops, nine tutorials, keynote speeches, and a co-located event – the inaugural Winter School on Arabic Natural Language Processing, co-organized by NYU Abu Dhabi and MBZUAI. The Winter School aims to enhance knowledge and skills in Arabic NLP research and development.
Supported by the Abu Dhabi Convention and Exhibition Bureau (ADCEB), part of the Department of Tourism and Culture – Abu Dhabi (DCT Abu Dhabi), this is the first time COLING is being organized in the Middle East.
Professor Preslav Nakov, Department Chair and Professor of NLP at MBZUAI, and Chair of the local organizing committee, stated that, “COLING 2025 brings together the brightest minds in AI and computational linguistics, creating an unparalleled opportunity for dialogue and innovation. As language technology continues to redefine the way humans interact with machines, we are looking forward to exploring how these advancements can be leveraged to solve regional and global challenges.”
The biennial conference, established in 1965, convenes participants and contributions from research centers, academic institutions, industrial research departments and tech start-ups around the world. The edition has accepted 853 papers to be part of the main conference, 22 of which are by MBZUAI students and faculty.
COLING 2025 marks the second premier conference on NLP being held in Abu Dhabi, after the success of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), organized by NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), in partnership with MBZUAI.
Additionally, the emirate hosted the 2024 editions of the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) and IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).
“Abu Dhabi offers a blend of tradition and modernity, and reflects the values of connectivity, learning, and exploration – values that resonate deeply with our scientific community. We are proud to showcase our region’s dedication to technology and language innovation, ” added Nakov.
The UAE ranked fifth in the 2024 Global AI Power Rankings. MBZUAI shines among the world’s top 10 universities for its specializations in AI, computer vision, machine learning, NLP, robotics, and comp. biology, and among the top 85 computer science universities, according to CSRankings.
