Muhammad AbdulMageed

Honored to share that I’ve received the Abdul Hameed Shoman Award for Arab Researchers (2025) in the AI and Arabic Language category. This recognition reflects the sustained work of my students, collaborators, and mentors—thank you. I’m grateful for the chance to advance Arabic AI/NLP in service of our communities. About the award: Established in 1982 by the Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation—the Arab Bank’s cultural and social responsibility arm—the award recognizes outstanding scientific contributions by Arab researchers across disciplines. #AI #ArabicNLP #NLP #LLMs #Research #ArabWorld

@JensenHuang @nvidia An important message, at a critical time.

For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter. AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models. images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-Weigh…

🌉#NAACL2027 will be June 1-5 in San Francisco, CA!🌉 ARR submission deadline: Oct. 12, 2026

That's a wrap! It was a pleasure sharing our work and connecting with colleagues at #ACL2026NLP.

Tomorrow, July 7, we will present our large-scale Alexandria project at ACL 2026 in San Diego! 🧬Alexandria: A Multi-Domain Dialectal Arabic Machine Translation Dataset for Culturally Inclusive and Linguistically Diverse LLMs aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.… 📍 Poster Session D 🕚 11:00 AM 📌 Panel C-57 🏛️ Coronado Ballroom, Level 4 📅 July 7, 2026 Alexandria is a large-scale, community-driven dataset for dialectal Arabic machine translation, designed to support culturally inclusive and linguistically diverse AI. It covers multiple Arab countries, domains, local varieties, and speaker–addressee configurations, helping move Arabic NLP beyond coarse dialect labels and toward more grounded evaluation of real language variation. Looking forward to discussing dialectal Arabic MT, culturally grounded evaluation, and how we can build more efficient and diverse AI. Abdellah EL Mekki, Ph.D., Samar M. Magdy, Houdaifa Atou, Ruwa AbuHweidi, Baraah Qawasmeh, OMER NACAR, Thikra Al-hibiri, Razan Saadie, Hamzah Alsayadi, Nadia Ghezaiel Hammouda, Alshima Mohammed Alkhazimi, Aya Hamod, Al-Yas Yaqoob Al-Ghafri, Wesam Ali El-Sayed, Asila Ismail al Sharji, Mohamad Ballout, Anas Belfathi, Karim Ghaddar, Serry Sibaee, Alaa Aoun, Aeej Mohammed Aseri, Lina Abureesh, Ahlam Bashiti, Majdal Yousef, Abdulaziz Hafiz, Yehdih Mohamed, Emira Hamedtou, Brakehe Emehah, Rahaf Alhamouri, Youssef Nafea, Aya El Aatar, Walid Al-Dhabyani, Emhemed S. Hamed, Sara Shatnawi, Fakhraddin Alwajih, Khalid Elkhidir, Ashwag Alasmari, Abdurrahman Gerrio, Omar Said Alshahri, AbdelRahim Elmadany, Ismail Berrada, Amir Azad Adil Al-kathiri, Fadi Zaraket, Mustafa Jarrar, Yahya Mohamed Elhadj, Hassan Alhuzali, and Muhammad Abdul-Mageed #ACL2026 #NLProc #ArabicNLP #MachineTranslation #LLMs #MultilingualNLP #ResponsibleAI #EfficientAI

Excited to share our presentation today, July 6, at ACL 2026 in San Diego! We will be presenting live at Panel C-98 in the Coronado Ballroom, Level 4. LQM: Linguistically Motivated Multidimensional Quality Metrics for Machine Translation Samar M. Magdy, Fakhraddin Alwajih, Abdellah El Mekki, Wesam El Sayed, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed aclanthology.org/2026.findings-… 📷 Poster Session D 📷 9:00 AM Panel C-98, Coronado Ballroom in Level 4 📷 July 6, 2026 Looking forward to discussing linguistically grounded evaluation for machine translation and how we can move toward more efficient and diverse AI. #ACL2026 #NLProc #MachineTranslation #ArabicNLP #Evaluation #ResponsibleAI #EfficientAI

Excited to share our July 6 presentation at ACL 2026 in San Diego! We will be presenting: LQM: Linguistically Motivated Multidimensional Quality Metrics for Machine Translation Samar M. Magdy, Fakhraddin Alwajih, Abdellah El Mekki, Wesam El Sayed, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed aclanthology.org/2026.findings-… 📍 Poster Session D 🕚 11:00 AM 📅 July 6, 2026 Looking forward to discussing linguistically grounded evaluation for machine translation and how we can move toward more efficient and diverse AI. #ACL2026 #NLProc #MachineTranslation #ArabicNLP #Evaluation #ResponsibleAI #EfficientAI

Join us tomorrow, July 5 for the following presentations at ACL 2026: LQM: Linguistically Motivated Multidimensional Quality Metrics for Machine Translation aclanthology.org/2026.findings-… Distilling the Essence: Efficient Reasoning Distillation via Sequence Truncation aclanthology.org/2026.findings-… Zero-Shot Context-Aware ASR for Diverse Arabic Varieties aclanthology.org/2026.findings-… See you tomorrow at ACL 2026 in San Diego!

UBC is a powerhouse for speech and language technology. Checkout some of our most recent publications.

📢 Check out the accepted ACL and ICML 2026 papers from the UBC NLP group! We look forward to presenting them in San Diego and Seoul! #ACL2026 #ICML2026 #NLProc

ArabicNLP continues growing with a record breaking number of submissions: 🔥 198 submissions! 🔥 That is a 102% increase from last year 🎉 We are excited for what's coming and hope to keep the momentum going! Reminder for the upcoming dates: - July 16, 2026: Reviews submission deadline - July 24 - July 31, 2026: Rebuttal period arabicnlp2026.sigarab.org

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Happy #CanadaDay 🇨🇦 🍁! Catch us at #ACL2026

Our work "Alexandria: A Multi-Domain Dialectal Arabic Machine Translation Dataset for Culturally Inclusive and Linguistically Diverse LLMs " will be presented by @mageed at #ACL2026 Main. 📍 Coronado: Session 17: Poster Session G 🗓 Tues., July 7: 11:00 AM–12:30 PM @aclmeeting

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🌍 We're heading to San Diego to present five papers at ACL 2026. This year’s work from our group and collaborators spans dialectal Arabic machine translation, speech technology, machine translation evaluation, context-aware ASR, and efficient reasoning distillation. I am especially grateful to the many students, collaborators, and community contributors whose work made these papers possible. 1. Alexandria: A Multi-Domain Dialectal Arabic Machine Translation Dataset for Culturally Inclusive and Linguistically Diverse LLMs Authors: Abdellah EL Mekki (Abdellah EL Mekki, Ph.D.), Samar M. Magdy (Samar M. Magdy), Houdaifa Atou (Houdaifa Atou), Ruwa AbuHweidi (Ruwa AbuHweidi), Baraah Qawasmeh, OMER NACAR, Thikra Al-hibiri, Razan Saadie, Hamzah Alsayadi, Dr. Eng. Nadia GHEZAIEL HAMMOUDA, Alshima Mohammed Alkhazimi, Aya Hamod, Al-Yas Yaqoob Al-Ghafri, Wesam Ali El-Sayed, Asila Ismail al Sharji, Mohamad Ballout, Anas Belfathi, Karim Ghaddar, Serry Sibaee, Alaa Aoun, Aeej Mohammed Aseri, Lina Abureesh, Ahlam Bashiti, Majdal Yousef, Abdulaziz Hafiz, Yehdih Mohamed, Emira Hamedtou, Brakehe Emehah, Rahaf Alhamouri, Youssef Nafea, Aya El Aatar, Walid Al-DHabyani, Emhemed Hamed, Sara Shatnawi, Fakhraddin Alwajih, Khalid Elkhidir, Ashwag Alasmari, Abdurrahman Gerrio, Omar Said Alshahri, AbdelRahim Elmadany, Ismail Berrada, Amir Azad Adli Al-kathiri, Fadi Zaraket, Mustafa Jarrar, Yahya Mohamed Elhadj, Hassan Alhuzali, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed URL: lnkd.in/gfhiKBjR 2. LQM: Linguistically Motivated Multidimensional Quality Metrics for Machine Translation Authors: Samar M. Magdy, Fakhraddin Alwajih, Abdellah El Mekki, Wesam El Sayed, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed URL: lnkd.in/g6rz7gui 3. Zero-Shot Context-Aware ASR for Diverse Arabic Varieties Authors: Bashar Talafha, Amin Abu Alhassan, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed URL: lnkd.in/gKGyGQgn 4. Arab Voices: Mapping Standard and Dialectal Arabic Speech Technology Authors: Peter Sullivan, AbdelRahim Elmadany, Alcides Alcoba Inciarte, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed URL: lnkd.in/gMzYhT8x 5. Distilling the Essence: Efficient Reasoning Distillation via Sequence Truncation Authors: Wei-Rui Chen, Vignesh Kothapalli, Ata Fatahibaarzi, Hejian Sang, Shao Tang, Qingquan Song, Zhipeng Wang, PhD, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed URL: lnkd.in/ghYp5S_u Congratulations to all co-authors and collaborators. Looking forward to discussing these works with the community at ACL 2026! #ACL2026 #NLProc #ArabicNLP #SpeechTechnology #MachineTranslation #LLMs #ResponsibleAI #MultilingualNLP

🙌 Machine translation is an important technology that is becoming ever more pervasive in business and daily life. It is widely known that machine translation errors can be embarrassing, if not catastrophic at times. When a model makes an error, it is not just about using a word or phrase that it should not have used. Rather, the error may reflect a broader blindness to language variation, linguistic structures, cultural norms, situational nuances, and more. For a long time, it has been difficult to characterize machine translation errors methodically and in ways that adhere to linguistic theory. Not anymore. Today, we introduce LQM, a linguistically motivated framework for characterizing machine translation quality. Along with the framework, we construct a bidirectional parallel corpus of machine translation errors, covering seven major Arabic dialects and labeled according to our taxonomy. The corpus is derived from conversational, culturally rich content. We use the corpus to evaluate the machine translation ability of six different LLMs against expert span-level human annotations, producing 6,113 labeled error spans across 3,495 unique erroneous sentences, along with severity-weighted quality scores. Our accompanying paper will appear in ACL 2026 Findings. Read the paper: “LQM: Linguistically Motivated Multidimensional Quality Metrics for Machine Translation” Link: aclanthology.org/2026.findings-… Work by Samar M. Magdy, Fakhraddin AlWajih, Abdellah EL Mekki, and Wesam Ali El-Sayed. #MachineTranslation #MachineTranslationErrors #MTEvaluation #ArabicNLP #ArabicDialects #LLMs #MultilingualNLP #ComputationalLinguistics #NLProc

Canada 🇨🇦 is a land of proud creators. Let’s keep building, together. Happy #CanadaDay! 🍁

Looking forward to receiving submissions to ArabicNLP2026.