AbjadStyleTransfer: Authorship Style Transfer for Arabic-Script Languages at AbjadNLP 2026

Shadi Abudalfa, Saad Ezzini, Ahmed Abdelali, Mustafa Jarrar, Mo El-Haj, Nadir Durrani, Hassan Sajjad, Farah Adeeba


Abstract
Authorship style transfer aims to rewrite a given text so that it reflects the distinctive style of a target author while preserving the original meaning. Despite growing interest in text style transfer, most existing work has focused on English and other high-resource languages, with limited attention to languages written in the Arabic script. In this paper, we present an overview of AbjadStyleTransfer, a shared task organised as part of the AbjadNLP workshop at EACL 2026, which targets authorship style transfer for Arabic-script languages with a strong focus on literary text. The shared task covers Modern Standard Arabic and Urdu, and is designed to encourage research on controllable text generation in morphologically rich and stylistically diverse languages. Participants are required to generate text that conforms to the writing style of a specified author, given a semantically equivalent formal input. We describe the task motivation, dataset construction, evaluation protocol, and participation statistics, and provide an initial discussion of the challenges associated with authorship style transfer in Arabic-script languages. AbjadStyleTransfer establishes a new benchmark for literary style transfer beyond Latin-script settings and supports future research on culturally grounded and linguistically informed text generation.
Anthology ID:
2026.abjadnlp-1.70
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on NLP for Languages Using Arabic Script
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Venues:
AbjadNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
545–549
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.abjadnlp-1.70/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shadi Abudalfa, Saad Ezzini, Ahmed Abdelali, Mustafa Jarrar, Mo El-Haj, Nadir Durrani, Hassan Sajjad, and Farah Adeeba. 2026. AbjadStyleTransfer: Authorship Style Transfer for Arabic-Script Languages at AbjadNLP 2026. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on NLP for Languages Using Arabic Script, pages 545–549, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AbjadStyleTransfer: Authorship Style Transfer for Arabic-Script Languages at AbjadNLP 2026 (Abudalfa et al., AbjadNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.abjadnlp-1.70.pdf