COLING 2025: New Horizons in Computational Linguistics for Religious Texts (Coling-Rel 25)

Innovating Computational Linguistics for Religious Studies

About the Workshop

The COLLING 2025 Workshop on New Horizons in Computational Linguistics for Religious Texts will be held with the 31st edition of COLING in 2025 in Abu Dhabi (UAE) (COLING 2025). This workshop invites researchers exploring the intersection of language technology and religious texts. This workshop aims to foster discussion on cutting-edge applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to religious texts, including:

Analyzing faith-defining canons and authoritative interpretations
Extracting insights from sermons, liturgy, prayers, and poetry
Leveraging Large Language Models for novel research avenues

We will explore the potential of NLP to unlock new understandings of religious traditions and chart the future of this exciting research area. The workshop welcomes researchers from computational linguistics, digital humanities, and related fields.

Chart the Future of Religious Text Analysis

Innovative NLP Applications for Deeper Understanding

Keynote Speaker
Prof. Ashraf Elnagar

Title:
AI for Understanding Sacred Texts: Insights, Challenges, and Opportunities

Prof. Ashraf Elnagar is a distinguished professor of Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Computer Science, University of Sharjah, UAE. He earned his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science from Kuwait University and his Ph.D. from the University of Alberta, Canada. Throughout his tenure at the University of Sharjah, Prof. Elnagar has held several prominent administrative roles, including Founding Chair of the Department of Computer Science, Chair of the Management Information Systems Department, Vice Dean of the College of Computing and Informatics, and Dean of the Community College. In 2017, Prof. Elnagar established a pioneering research group specializing in Machine Learning and Arabic Language Processing, dedicated to developing innovative solutions for analyzing and processing Arabic text using advanced AI technologies. Prof. Elnagar has an extensive research portfolio, with over 150 publications in leading international journals and conference proceedings, reflecting his impactful contributions to the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing. He has been consistently recognized as one of the top 2% of scientists worldwide in the Stanford University report, underscoring his global influence and research excellence. In addition to his research endeavors, Prof. Elnagar has supervised many graduate students, fostering a new generation of innovators and researchers in Artificial Intelligence.

Sunday, January 19, 2025

09:30 AM - 09:45 AM

Opening remarks by the Organizing Committee

Chair: Sane Yagi, University of Sharjah

09:45 AM - 10:30 AM

Plenary Speaker: Professor Ashraf Alnagar, College of Computing and Informatics, University of Sharjah

Title: AI for Understanding Sacred Texts: Insights, Challenges, and Opportunities
Chair: Sane Yagi, University of Sharjah

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Session 1: Papers

Chair: Majdi Sawalha

10:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Break

11:00 AM - 11:30 AM

Messages from the Quran and the Bible in Mandarin through Factor Analysis with Syntactic and Semantic Tags

Kuanlin Liu
NTUB

11:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Multi-stage Training of Bilingual Islamic LLM for Neural Passage Retrieval

Vera Pavlova
rttl.ai

12:00 PM - 12:30 PM

Word boundaries and the morphology-syntax trade-off

Pablo Mosteiro and Damián Blasi
Utrecht University, and Harvard University and Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

12:30 PM - 02:00 PM

Lunch Break

02:00 PM - 03:30 PM

Session 2: Papers

Chair: Bayan Abu Shawar, Al-Ain University

02:00 PM - 02:30 PM

MASAQ Parser: A Fine-grained MorphoSyntactic Analyzer for the Quran

Majdi Sawalha, Faisal Alshargi, Sane Yagi, Abdallah AlShdiafat, Bassam Hammo
The University of Jordan and Al-Ain University, Amazon robotic, University of Sharjah, and Mohamed bin Zayed University for Humanities

02:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Automated Authentication of Quranic Verses Using BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) based Language Models

Khubaib Alam, Maryam Khalid, Syed Ahmed Ali, Haroon Mahmood, Qaisar Shafi, Muhammad Haroon, Zulqarnain Haider
Al Ain University, UAE and National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences Pakistan

03:00 PM - 03:30 PM

Leveraging AI to Bridge Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic for Text Simplification

Shatha Altammami
King Saud University

03:30 PM - 04:00 PM

Break

04:00 PM - 05:30 PM

Session 3: Papers

Chair: Abdallah T. AlShdaifat, Mohmed Bin Zayed University for Humanities

04:00 PM - 04:30 PM

Automated Translation of Islamic Literature Using Large Language Models: Al-Shamela Library Application

Mohammad Khair and Majdi Sawalha
QuranComputing.org, and The University of Jordan and Al-Ain University

04:30 PM - 05:00 PM

Comparative Analysis of Religious Texts: NLP Approaches to the Bible, Quran, and Bhagavad Gita

Mahit Nandan A D, Ishan Godbole, Pranav M Kapparad, Shrutilipi Bhattacharjee
National Institute of Technology Karnantaka

05:00 PM - 05:30 PM

Semantic Analysis of Jurisprudential Zoroastrian Texts in Pahlavi: A Word Embedding Approach for an Extremely Under-Resourced, Extinct Language

Rashin Rahnamoun and Ramin Rahnamoun
Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering Shahid Beheshti University, Department of Computer Engineering Central Tehran Branch Islamic Azad University

05:30 PM - 06:15 PM

Session 4: Posters

Chair: Norhan Abbas, The University of Leeds

06:15 PM - 07:00 PM

Panel Discussion

Chair: Organizers

Computational Morphology and Syntax

Computational Morphology and Syntax for Religious texts;

Analysis of ceremonial, liturgical, and ritual speech

analysis of ceremonial, liturgical, and ritual speech; recitation styles; speech decorum; discourse analysis for religious texts;

knowledge representation

suitability of modal and other logics for knowledge representation and inference in religious texts;

Machine Translation

issues in, and evaluation of, machine translation in religious texts;

Text Mining

text-mining, stylometry, and authorship attribution for religious texts;

Corpus Tools

corpus query languages and tools for exploring religious corpora;

Dictionaries

dictionaries, thesaurai, Wordnet, and ontologies for religious texts;

Semantic Relatedness

measuring semantic relatedness between multiple religious texts;

Annotated Corpora

(new) corpora and rich and novel annotation schemes for religious texts;

Metaphor

annotation and analysis of religious metaphor;

Genre Analysis

genre analysis for religious texts;

Large Language Models

LLMs adaptation for religious texts;

Ethics

ethical issues of LLMs for religious texts;

in other disciplines

application of computer-supported methods in the analysis of religious texts in other disciplines (e.g., theology, classics, philosophy, literature).

Majdi Sawalha

Artificial Intelligence Department, The University of Jordan, Jordan, And College of Engineering, Al-Ain University, Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Sane Yagi

College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, University of Sharjah, UAE.

Faisal Alshargi

Magdeburg University, Germany.

Abdallah Al-Shdaifat

Arabic Language Department, Mohamad bin Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Ashraf Elnagar

Computer Science Department, University of Sharjah, UAE.

Bayan Abu Shawar

College of Engineering, Al-Ain University, Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Noorhan Abbas

School of Computing, The University of Leeds, Leeds, UK.

First Call for Papers

Monday, 15th July 2024

Second Call for papers

Monday, 9th September 2024

Final Call for papers

Sunday, 29th September 2024

Paper Submission due

Extended to Monday, 18th November 2024

Notification for Acceptance

Thursday, 5th December 2024

Camera-ready format

Friday, 13th December 2024

COLING-2025 Workshops

19-20 January 2025

COLING-Rel 25 Workshop

19 January 2025

COLING-2025 conference

21-24 January 2025

Submission Information

Coling-Rel25 workshop invites the submission of long papers of up to eight pages (limits only apply to the main body of the paper). We are following the instructions for COLING 25 proceedings ( https://coling2025.org/downloads/coling-2025.pdf ) which can be found on this page https://coling2025.org/calls/main_conference_papers/ . At the end of the paper (after the conclusions but before the references) papers need to include a mandatory section discussing the limitations of the work and, optionally, a section discussing ethical considerations. Papers can include unlimited pages of references and an unlimited appendix.

To prepare your submission, please make sure to use the COLING 2025 style files available here:

LaTeX [ https://coling2025.org/downloads/coling-2025.zip ]
Word [ https://coling2025.org/downloads/coling-2025.docx ]
Overleaf [ https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/instructions-for-coling-2025-proceedings/hfhcytgpqmzf ]

Direct submission

Papers should be submitted through Softconf/START using the following link:
https://softconf.com/coling2025/Coling-Rel25/

Each paper will receive a minimum of three reviews. Authors will have the opportunity to provide a short rebuttal to clarify any misunderstandings. The review process will be double-blind. Reviewers will not see authors, authors will not see reviewers. Reviews and submissions will not be made publicly visible.

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