Call for Participation: AlexandriaX-2026 ArabicNLP Shared Task

[samar magdy]

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that registration is now open for AlexandriaX-2026, an ArabicNLP 2026 Shared Task on Context-Aware Dialectal Arabic Machine Translation and MT Evaluation.

AlexandriaX-2026 focuses on building and diagnosing dialectal Arabic MT systems across diverse Arabic varieties, with emphasis on dialogue context, speaker metadata, dialectal naturalness, cross-dialect translation, and interpretable MT error analysis.

The shared task includes three subtasks:

1. Context-Aware English-to-Dialectal Arabic Dialogue Translation
   Participants build systems that translate English dialogue turns into specified Arabic dialects using contextual information such as previous turns, target dialect/country, domain, speaker/addressee gender, and persona attributes when available.

2. Cross-Dialect Arabic Machine Translation
   Participants build Arabic-to-Arabic MT systems for short financial-domain queries, translating from one Arabic variety into another and testing robustness across seen and unseen dialect pairs.

3. English-to-Dialectal Arabic Machine Translation Error Detection and Classification
   Participants build systems that identify word-level error spans in dialectal Arabic MT outputs and classify each span using an LQM-inspired error typology.

Website: https://alexandriax.dlnlp.ai/
Registration form: https://forms.gle/K6d9B5Qs5EsJTF2V7
Google Group: https://groups.google.com/g/alexandriax-2026

Important dates:

• Task launch: May 16, 2026
• Training/development data, baseline code, and evaluation scripts released: June 1, 2026
• Registration deadline and blind test release: July 20, 2026
• Final system output deadline: July 25, 2026
• Final results released: July 30, 2026
• System description papers due: August 22, 2026
• Shared task overview paper due: September 1, 2026
• Conference camera-ready deadline: September 10, 2026
• ArabicNLP / EMNLP presentation period: October 24–29, 2026

Teams may participate in any subset of the three subtasks. We encourage participation from researchers and students working on Arabic NLP, machine translation, dialectal modeling, MT evaluation, multilingual NLP, and low-resource language technologies.

Please register by July 20, 2026, and join the Google Group for task announcements, data releases, clarifications, and evaluation updates.

Best regards,
The AlexandriaX-2026 Organizing Team