Towards an Understanding of Arab Women Researchers Contribution in Arabic NLP

Abstract

Arabic language is spoken by around 400 million people living in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa. Like other languages, literary Arabic continues to evolve; this suggests a large potential audience for Arabic Natural language processing (NLP) and the need for a fair contribution from both men and women Arabic NLP researchers. Our paper will explore Arab women researchers’ contributions in the field of Arabic Natural Language processing research (ANLP) by answering 9 research questions. We answer these questions through examining research metadata from Digital Bibliography & Library Project (DBLP) and Google Scholar. We found that the proportion of Arab women researchers in ANLP compared to men is similar to the international level. We also observed their publication, collaboration and citation patterns. Our results point to the need for gender equity initiatives to increase the number of Arab female researchers in ANLP.