Arabic NLP - Introductions

This is the introduction thread for Arabic NLP practitioners.

Welcome! Please introduce yourself and let us know:

  • Your name, Github, Hugging Face, and/or Twitter handle
  • Your interest in Arabic NLP
  • Some projects you are working on or interested in starting
  • Any other languages that you speak, any personal interests, anything else really :wink:
7 Likes

Hey, I am Zaid Alyafeai, my handle is @zaidalyafeai in all platforms. I have been working on Arabic NLP for a while now tackling different problems like text generation, evaluating tokenizers for Arabic, compact language modelling and distillation. I am currently working on improving language modelling for Arabic. I and my friend Maged co-founded arbml which is library that revises the nlp pipeline for Arabic starting from preprocessing, tokenization, training and deployment ARBML · GitHub. I speak kind of English and mostly I like to work on GANs in my free time.

5 Likes

I’m Shorouq (don’t worry, I forgive you for not being able to pronounce this). Got to work with Arabic NLP during my graduate programme at Uppsala University (language technology). I consider Arabic dialects to be separate languages and it’s a special interest of mine. Another important interest for me is chatbots and I’m hoping to get started on a Levantine Arabic conversational bot using language-generation. Let’s see how that goes. I speak Arabic and English fluently, quite rusty german, and intermediate Swedish.

Add me on Twitter to chat! https://twitter.com/shjza

5 Likes

Hey, I’m Abdulelah Al Mesfer. I consider myself as a novice in NLP. At the moment, I’m interested in working with gulf dialects in Arabic (Saudi, UAE, Oman, Yemen … etc) and dialects within Saudi Arabia (Najdi, Hijaz, … etc).

Starting this fall, I’ll be pursuing a graduate degree where I’ll attempt to focus on contributing to Arabic NLP research and applications.

My GH handle is @abdulelahsm and you can connect with me on twitter @asmesfer

Looking forward to learn from and contribute to this community :smiley:

3 Likes

Hi, I’m Osama Salem. Sophomore student majored in CS. I’m new to the whole idea of NLP and specifically Arabic NLP.
I joined the world of machine learning 6 months ago. 3 months later I started working on basic NLP in English. Now for the last two weeks, I’m focusing on Arabic NLP.
All the NLP tasks that I have worked on are text classification specifically working on newsletters. I’m trying to get satisfying results before moving to the next NLP task.
You can find me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/oafsalem, and I speak both Arabic and English.

3 Likes

Hi, I’m Nick Doiron (monsoon-nlp here, mapmeld on Twitter).
A year ago I combined Arabic dialect datasets to make a classifier; I also have a GPT-2 model finetuned on dialect markers but I can’t test the accuracy.
In 2019 I visited Re-Coded’s code schools in Turkey and Iraq. I’d be interested in projects which would support and engage the Arabic speakers in their programs.
I’m also attempting to test model bias with a seq2seq model which flips male and female words. Still a work in progress - need to find additional sources for training data

3 Likes

Hi, I am Kamel Gaanoun from Morocco(kamelstats on Twitter). I am starting m’y PhD on Arabic-NLP with a focus on dialects. I am interested un dialect Identification, topic modelling and automatic translation. I speak Arabic, French and English.

3 Likes

Hey all, nice to meet you. If you already know we have an article about state of Arabic NLP Arabic NLP - Tutorial - الدورة التعليمية, please look at, revise and suggest any improvements.

1 Like

Hey, my name is Ebrahim Mohammed, my handle on Twitter is @mobarmg. I am the engineering manager for Naseej where I lead a team of software engineers, ML engineers, and researchers. I am interested in NLU, Knowledge representation, and extraction. We plan to build real-world applications of natural language processing for the Arabian region.

2 Likes

Hi, my name is Bilel Moulahi. I work as a data scientist at Akio (Montpellier, France). My twitter is @bilelmoulahi.
Actually, my work on NLP mainly focuses on text classification and extraction problems. I speak Arabic, French and English.
For now, I mostly work on French and Spanish data, but I’m also curious about Arabic as it is my native language.

3 Likes

Hey all, I created a new thread to discuss a family languages called MRLs (Arabic included).

1 Like

Hello everyone, I hope I’m not very late here.
I’m Mohamed Al Salti, M-Salti on Github, salti on HF and m_salti_ on Twitter (such a mess of handles, right?)
I started working on Arabic NLP last year, mostly on question answering and information retrieval for my graduation project, and I have published some QA models to the model hub.
Currently, I’m trying to work on natural language generation in Arabic and trying to be better at deep learning in general.
I speak English very well and know very basic French and German.

I look forward to collaborating with this community and seeing it grow.

2 Likes

Salam!

  • My name is Mohamed El-Geish (Github, Hugging Face, Twitter, etc: https://elgeish.com)
  • I’m interested in NLP and Speech, especially ASR and QA
  • Some projects I’m working on: elgeish (Mohamed El-Geish)
  • Arabic and English (native); Spanish and German (basic)

Looking forward to collaborating with you all!

4 Likes

Hi all :hugs:
This is Obeida ElJundi. I am a data scientist at Schlumberger, UAE.

I just finished my 3-years Masters at American University of Beirut, and I am a member of the AUB MIND. My main focus was about Arabic NLP. Some of my work in Arabic NLP includes:

  • winning first place in extracting emotions from Arabic Tweets in SemEval 2018
  • developing the first Arabic-specific universal model: hULMonA
  • developing a dataset for Arabic Image Captioning
    Repos & papers are on AUB MIND Github

I speak Arabic & English. Looking forward to meet you guys & to contribute to this awesome community!

my handles:

  • Twitter: EljundiObeida
  • LinkedIn: obeidaeljundi
  • Github: ObeidaElJundi
1 Like

Hi,
I’m Ahmed Abdou.
Github: AhmedAbdel-Aal · GitHub
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AhmedAb41494847

I am interested in Arabic NLP in general because I know that Arabic NLP has yet much work to do and we should invest in it. I am working currently in research project to review the Arabic Diacritization techniques applied so far, how can we improve it, how much useful it can be. I am also interested in affective computing in general.

Hey y’all,

Abdulwahab Sahyoun. ML & NLP engineer working as a part-time consultant.

I’m currently pursuing my Master’s in Machine Learning at Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence.
My current work focuses on the evaluation of multi-dialect Arabic ASR systems. Aiming to build a language specific metric that can be used by researchers for more interpretable result assessments.

Hello everyone, my name is Ali Hamdi Ali Fadel, from Libya. My username of GitHub: AliOsm, HuggingFace: AliOsm, and Twitter: @alihfadel. I’m interested in multiple problems in Arabic NLP. But I’m very curious about text diacritization problem and how to utilize the added diacritics to solve almost every other problem (Check my scholar profile to read more about the problem). Correctly, I’m participating in the Arabicthon in the poetry generation path, this is my only project for now :slight_smile: But I’m planning to start working on a project that I hope it will make a huge advancement in the Arabic diacritization and other languages diacritization. I’m speaking English and interested in Lego and Competitive Programming.