A Short Introduction to Arabic Natural Language Processing (Nizar Habash)

PLENARY PRESENTATION
A Short Introduction to Arabic Natural Language Processing
Nizar Habash
New York University Abu Dhabi
Abstract: Arabic poses many challenges for natural language processing. The Arabic language is not only morphologically rich, but also highly ambiguous. In addition to Standard Arabic, there are many dialects that vary widely. We discuss these different challenges and their interactions, and present a number of basic enabling language technologies and resources to address them.
Bio: Nizar Habash is a Professor of Computer Science at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), and the director of the Computational Approaches to Modeling Language (CAMeL) Lab. Before joining NYUAD in 2014, he was a research scientist at Columbia University’s Center for Computational Learning Systems. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland College Park in 2003. He has two bachelors degrees, one in Computer Engineering and one in Linguistics and Languages. He specializes in natural language processing and computational linguistics, and his research includes extensive work on machine translation, morphological analysis, and computational modeling of Arabic and its dialects. He has over 200 publications including a book entitled “Introduction to Arabic Natural Language Processing”.