Research within Natural Language Processing (NLP) theme focuses on fundamental and applied research aiming at developing and building computer systems that are able to understand text or speech data and respond accordingly in much the same way human beings do, including sentiment analysis, spam detection, authorship attribution, machine translation, text/speech summarization, text/speech generation, virtual agents and chatbots, speech recognition, and Arabic spell checking. This is in addition to building linguistic resources especially for Arabic (datasets, lexicons, and tools) and developing advanced approaches with the ability to learn from low resources.