MBZUAI welcomes world to Abu Dhabi for NLP conference

The 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2025) launches in Abu Dhabi on Sunday, with local organisers Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) welcoming more than 1,500 global attendees.

Organised under the auspices of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL), COLING takes place at Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre (ADNEC) from 19-24 January, 2025, with a co-located event – the first-ever Winter School on Arabic Natural Language Processing, co-organised by NYU Abu Dhabi and MBZUAI and taking place from January 18 - 19.

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 held in the Middle East. It will include 22 workshops, nine tutorials, keynote speeches, and the Winter School – designed to advance knowledge and skills in Arabic NLP research and development.

“COLING 2025 brings together the brightest minds in AI and computational linguistics, creating an unparalleled opportunity for dialogue and innovation,” said Professor Preslav Nakov, Department Chair and Professor of NLP at MBZUAI, and Chair of the local organising committee.

“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.”

Established in 1965, the biennial conference attracts participants and contributions from research centres, academic institutions, industrial research departments and tech start-ups around the world.

This year, 853 papers were accepted to be part of the main conference – 22 of which are by MBZUAI students and faculty.

COLING 2025 is the second top-tier conference on NLP to take place in Abu Dhabi, after the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), organised by NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), in partnership with MBZUAI.

The emirate also 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,” added Nakov. “We are proud to showcase our region’s dedication to technology and language innovation.”

The UAE came fifth in the 2024 Global AI Power Rankings, while MBZUAI is recognised as one of the world’s top 10 universities for its specialisations in AI, computer vision, machine learning, NLP, robotics, and comp. biology, and among the top 85 computer science universities, according to CSRankings.