Speaker: Nizar Habash is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). Professor Habash’s research includes extensive work on machine translation, morphological analysis, and computational modeling of Arabic and its dialects. Professor Habash has been a principal investigator or co-investigator on over 20 grants. He has over 200 publications including a book titled “Introduction to Arabic Natural Language Processing.” His website is www.nizarhabash.com. He is the director of the NYUAD Computational Approaches to Modeling Language (CAMeL) Lab (www.camel-lab.com). Summary: The Arabic language presents a number of challenges to researchers and developers of language technologies. Arabic is both morphologically rich and highly ambiguous; and it has a number of dialects that vary widely amongst themselves and with Standard Arabic. The dialects have no official spelling standards, and spelling and grammar errors are common in unedited Standard Arabic. In this talk, we present some of these challenges in detail and cover some of the ongoing efforts to address them with creative language technologies.