There has been a lot of progress in the last 15 years in the area of Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP). In particular, the TIDES, GALE, and BOLT programs provided a significant boost to Arabic NLP, both in generating new language and speech resources on a large scale, and in advancing the stateof-the-art in morphological processing, parsing, named entity recognition, information retrieval, speech recognition, and machine translation. The substantial investment done through these projects reflect the fact that the Middle East continues to grow in its political and economic importance. We also observe that countries in the Middle East invest substantially into higher education and into building an ecosystem, which fosters new research initiatives. This creates the hope that our own research field, NLP, and especially Arabic NLP will continue to grow, will continue to attract students both in the region and in top international universities, and that new job opportunities will open up not only in the well established language service providers, but also through start-ups offering innovative solutions.A number of Arabic NLP (or Arabic NLP-related) workshops and conferences have taken place, both in the Arab World and in association with international conferences. The Arabic NLP workshop at EMNLP 2014 follows in the footsteps of these previous efforts to provide a forum for researchers to share and discuss their ongoing work. The Arabic NLP workshop also includes a shared task on Automatic Arabic Error Correction, which was designed in the tradition of high profile NLP shared tasks such as CONLL's grammar/error detection and correction shared tasks in 2011-2013, and numerous machine translation campaigns by NIST/WMT/MEDAR, among others. The challenge chosen for the shared task is highly relevant, not only to spelling correction while composing a text, but also to developing techniques for automatically correcting errors in the far-from-perfect outputs of NLP technologies such as speech recognition or machine translation.We are happy to have received 40 submissions. Unfortunately, not all the papers could be included in the workshop due to time limitations. The acceptance rate is 50%. The papers cover a wide range of topics: building language resources for standard and dialectal Arabic, language identification, sentiment analysis, named entity disambiguation, and machine translation for dialectal Arabic, etc. Twelve papers were selected for oral presentation and were organized under the general topics Corpora (four papers), Text Mining (four papers), Translation & Transliteration (three papers) and one paper describing the shared task. The remaining eight papers were selected to be presented in a poster session. There is no difference in quality between the oral and poster presentations.The shared task was a success. We received 18 systems submissions from nine teams in six countries, representing a diverse set of approaches. Nine shared task system description (short) papers are included in the proceedings to ...