Mustafa Jarrar

Title:

Arabic Natural Language Understanding

Time:

13:45 - 14:30

Abstract:

Natural Language Understanding allows people to extract meaning and metadata from unstructured text data. In this talk, I will provide an overview of a set of NLU tasks, tools, and datasets, focusing on the advancements made in Arabic. These tasks include Word-Sense Disambiguation (WSD), Target-Sense Verification (TSV), Synonym Extraction, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relationship Extraction, Event Identification, and Intent Detection, among others.

Biography:

Full professor of Computer Science, director of the PhD Program, and the director of SinaLab for Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence at Birzeit University. He was a Fulbright visiting professor at the University at Buffalo in the USA (2016-2017), a Marie Curie fellow at the University of Cyprus (2007-2009), and a senior research scientist at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (1999-2007), where he completed his Masters (2000) and PhD (early 2005).

Jarrar has won several prestigious awards including, the Shoman Arab Researchers Award in Technology, Mohammed Bin Rashid Award for the Arabic Language, and Google Faculty Research Award. He has published 80+ articles in the areas of Natural Language Processing, Ontology Engineering, Semantic Web, and Graph Databases. Jarrar has also chaired 30 international conferences, a PC member of 150+ journals and conferences, a coordinator/manager of 25 large EU projects, a full member of the IFIP2.6 on Database Semantics, the IFIP2.12 on Web Semantics, and the UN ESCWA Technology Centre Board of Governors, among others.

Prof. Jarrar is also the founder of both Sina Institute for Knowledge Engineering and Language Technologies, and the Palestinian e-Government Academy, and advisor of minister of Telecom & IT, where he also developed and chaired the Palestinian e-Government Interoperability Framework.

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