Dr. Wajdi Zaghouani

Assistant Professor in Master of Arts in Digital Humanities and Societies

Middle Eastern Studies Department (MESD)

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Master of Arts in Digital Humanities and Societies

Email
Phone+974 4454 5601
Office locationA141, LAS

Biography

Dr. Zaghouani is an Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities within the Middle Eastern Studies department of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS) at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU).

He received a Ph.D. in Natural Language Processing from the University of Paris Nanterre, and an M.A in Linguistics from the University of Montreal. His research interests span several areas of computational linguistics: Arabic Data Analytics, Linguistic Annotation, Language Resources and Evaluation, Fake News Detection, Sentiment Analysis, Lexical-Semantics and Computational Morphology. Over the years, he participated in multiple large scale human language technology projects such as the Penn Arabic TreeBank and PropBank, the Multi-Arabic Dialect Applications and Resources project (MADAR), The Qatar Arabic Language Bank in several universities and research institutions such as the University of Colorado Boulder, the Joint Research Center of the European Commission, the University of Montreal, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Zaghouani worked as a consultant in various international companies specialized in Big Data and Information Management such as Nuance, OpenText, Nstein Technologies, Temis France and Lionridge. He co-organized several international conferences and workshops such as Arabic Natural Language Processing workshops, the Social Media Analysis in the Arab World SocInfo 2019 workshop, The QICC Fake News Detection Contest, the CheckThat! Fact Checking CLEF Lab, The Arabic Author Profiling and Deception Detection FIRE 2019 Task, and the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) Conference. He published over 50+ peer-reviewed journal and conference publications cited 912 times with an h-index of 17.

Research Interests

Digital Humanities
Social Media Data Processing
Big Data Analytics
Corpus Linguistics
Language Resources Annotation and Evaluation
Computational Social Science
Arabic Natural Language Processing
Computational Linguistics
Rhetorical Analysis
Author Profiling
Open Sources Tools and Resources
Educational Technologies

Experience

Postdoctoral Research Associate

Information Systems Program, Carnegie Mellon University (Qatar)

2015-2018

Senior Research Associate

Computer Science Program, Carnegie Mellon University (Qatar)
2012-2015
Visiting Scholar at the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC)

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA
2006-2010
Consultant (Computational Linguist)

University of Colorado Boulder, Colorado, USA
2009-2010

Researcher in Arabic Natural Language Processing

The Language technology group of the Joint Research Center (JRC), Ispra, Italy
2005-2006
Computational Linguist

OpenText Inc., Montreal, Canada
2002- 2004

Education

PhD in Computational Linguistics

University of Paris Nanterre La Defense, (Paris, France)

2015

MA in Computational Linguistics

University of Montreal, (Montreal, Canada)
2009
BA in Computational Linguistics

(Minor in Computer Science, Major in Linguistics), University of Quebec in Montreal, (Montreal, Canada)
2002

BA in French Literature

Language and Civilization, Université de Kairouan, (Kairouan, Tunisia)
1999

Selected Publications

Wajdi Zaghouani and Anis Charfi

ArapTweet: A Large Multi-Dialect Twitter Corpus for Gender, Age and Language Variety Identification (LREC 2018, Miyazaki, Japan (7-12 May 2018)
2018
P Rosso, F Rangel, IH Farías, L Cagnina, W Zaghouani, A Charfi

A survey on author profiling, deception, and irony detection for the Arabic language Language and Linguistics Compass Vol 12 (Issue 4); First published: 11 April 2018 https://doi.org/1
2018
Wajdi Zaghouani and Anis Charfi

Guidelines and Annotation Framework for Arabic Author Profiling (OSACT3 Workshop, LREC 2018, Miyazaki, Japan (7-12 May 2018)
2018
Houda Bouamor, Nizar Habash, Mohammad Salameh, Wajdi Zaghouani, Owen Rambow, Dana Abdulrahim, Ossama Obeid, Salam Khalifa, Fadhl Eryani, Alexander Erdmann and Kemal Oflazer

The MADAR Arabic Dialect Corpus and Lexicon (LREC 2018, Miyazaki, Japan ((7-12 May 2018)
2018
Nizar Habash, Salam Khalifa, Fadhl Eryani, Owen Rambow, Dana Abdulrahim, Alexander Erdmann, Reem Faraj, Wajdi Zaghouani, Houda Bouamor, Nasser Zalmout, Sara Hassan, Faisal Al shargi, Sakhar Alkhereyf, Basma Abdulkareem, Ramy Eskander, Mohammad Salameh and

Unified Guidelines and Resources for Arabic Dialect Orthography (LREC 2018, Miyazaki, Japan (7-12 May 2018)
2018
Ossama Obeid, Salam Khalifa, Nizar Habash, Houda Bouamor, Wajdi Zaghouani and Kemal Oflazer

MADARi: A Web Interface for Joint Arabic Morphological Annotation and Spelling Correction. (LREC 2018, Miyazaki, Japan (7-12 May 2018)
2018
Sawsan AlQahtani, Mona Diab and Wajdi Zaghouani

ARLEX: A Large Scale Comprehensive Lexical Inventory for Modern Standard Arabic (OSACT3 Workshop, LREC 2018, Miyazaki, Japan (7-12 May 2018)
2018
Wajdi Zaghouani

Language Technologies for Social Media. INFuture 2017, Zagreb, Croatia
2017
Wajdi Zaghouani, Abdelati Hawwari, Sawsan Alqahtani, Houda Bouamor, Mahmoud Ghoneim, Mona Diab and Kemal Oflazer

Using Ambiguity Detection to Streamline Linguistic Annotation, In Proceedings of Coling Workshop "Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity" (CL4LC), Osaka Japan, December 2016
2016
Wajdi Zaghouani, Nizar Habash, Houda Bouamor, Ossama Obeid, Sawsan Alqahtani, Mona Diab and Kemal Oflazer

Filtering Dialectal Arabic Text in Two Large Scale Annotation Projects. The 2nd Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT), December 11 2016, Osaka, Japan
2016
Wajdi Zaghouani, Abdelaati Hawaari and Mona Diab

AMPN: A Lexical Semantic Resource for Arabic Morphological Patterns. International Journal of Speech Technology (IJST).
2016
Wajdi Zaghouani, Ahmed Abdelali, Francisco Guzman and Hassan Sajjad.

Normalizing Mathematical Expressions to Improve the Translation of Educational Content. In Proceedings of the AMTA 2016 Workshop Semitic Machine Translation (SeMaT) Collocated with EMNLP 2016 Workshops on November 1st, 2016 Austin, Texas, USA
2016
Wajdi Zaghouani and Dana Awad

Toward an Arabic Punctuated Corpus: Annotation Guidelines and Evaluation. In Proceedings of The 2nd workshop on Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools 2016 Theme: Social Media.
2016
Zaghouani, Wajdi, Houda Bouamor, Abdelati Hawwari, Mona Diab, Ossama Obeid, Mahmoud Ghoneim, Sawsan Alqahtani, Kemal Oflazer

Guidelines and Framework for a Large Scale Arabic Diacritized Corpus. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'2016).
2016
Zaghouani Wajdi, Nizar Habash, Ossama Obeid, Behrang Mohit, Houda Bouamor, Kemal Oflazer

Building an arabic machine translation post-edited corpus: Guidelines and annotation. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'2016).
2016
Ossama Obeid, Houda Bouamor, Zaghouani, Wajdi, Mahmoud Ghoneim, Abdelati Haww ari, Sawsan Alqahtani, Mona Diab, Kemal Oflazer

MANDIAC: A Web-based Annotation System For Manual Arabic Diacritization. In Proceedings of The 2nd Workshop on Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools 2016 Theme: Social Media
2016
E.A. Draffan, Mike Wald, Nawar Halabi, Ouadie Sabia, Wajdi Zaghouani, Amatullah Kadous, Amal Idris, Nadine Zeinoun, David Banes, Dana Lawand

Generating acceptable Arabic Core Vocabularies and Symbols for AAC users. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies, Interspeech 2015, Dreseden, Germany, 6-10 September 2015.
2015
Zaghouani, Wajdi, Nizar Habash, Houda Bouamor, Alla Rozovskaya, Behrang Mohit, Abeer Heider and Kemal Oflazer

Correction Annotation for Non-Native Arabic Texts: Guidelines and Corpus. In Proceedings of the 9th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, co- located with NAACL in Denver, Colorado, USA, 2015
2015
Houda Bouamor, Wajdi Zaghouani, Mona Diab, Ossama Obeid, Kemal Oflazer, Mahmoud Ghoneim and Abdelati Hawwari

A Pilot Study on Arabic Multi-Genre Corpus Diacritization. 2015. In Proceedings of the ACL 2015 Workshop on Arabic Natural Language Processing (ANLP), Beijin, China, July 2015.
2015
Wajdi Zaghouani, Taha Zerrouki and Amar Balla

SAHSOH@QALB-2015 Shared Task: A Rule-Based Correction Method of Common Arabic Native and Non-Native Speakers’ Errors. The Second QALB Shared Task on Automatic Text Correction for Arabic. In Proceedings of the ACL 2015 Workshop on Arabic Natural Language Processing.
2015
Alla Rozovskaya; Houda Bouamor; Nizar Habash; Wajdi Zaghouani; Ossama Obeid; Behrang Mohit

The Second QALB Shared Task on Automatic Text Correction for Arabic. In Proceedings of the ACL 2015 Workshop on Arabic Natural Language Processing (ANLP), Beijing, China, July 2015
2015
Behrang Mohit; Alla Rozovskaya; Nizar Habash; Wajdi Zaghouani; Ossama Obeid

The First QALB Shared Task on Automatic Text Correction for Arabic. In Proceedings of the EMNLP 2014 Workshop on Arabic Natural Language Processing (ANLP), Doha, Qatar, October 2014.
2014
Serena Jeblee; Houda Bouamor; Wajdi Zaghouani; Kemal Oflazer CMUQ@QALB-2014: An SMT-based System for Automatic Arabic Error Correction.

In Proceedings of the EMNLP 2014 Workshop on Arabic Natural Language Processing (ANLP), Doha, Qatar, October 2014.
2014
Wajdi Zaghouani, Behrang Mohit, Nizar Habash, Ossama Obeid, Nadi Tomeh and Kemal Oflazer

Large-scale Arabic Error Annotation: Guidelines and Framework. in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'2014), Rejkavik, Iceland, 26-31 May 2014
2014
Wajdi Zaghouani and Kais Dukes.

Can Crowdsourcing be used for Effective Annotation of Arabic? In Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'2014), Rejkavik, Iceland, 26-31 May 2014
2014
Wajdi Zaghouani

Critical Survey of the Freely Available Arabic Corpora. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'2014), OSACT Workshop. Rejkavik, Iceland, 26-31 May 2014
2014
Ossama Obeid, Wajdi Zaghouani, Behrang Mohit, Nizar Habash, Kemal Oflazer and Nadi Tomeh

A Web-based Annotation Framework For Large- Scale Text Correction. In Proceedings of IJCNLP’2013, Nagoya, Japan.
2013
Abdelaati Hawwari, Mohsen Rashwan and Wajdi Zaghouani

A Lexical Semantic Resource for Quranic Morphological Patterns. The International conference for the development of Quranic studies. http://www.quranicconferences.com/ . Riyadh, KSA. 16-20 February 2013
2013
Wajdi Zaghouani. Arabic Natural Language Processing and the Future

In proceedings of the CECTAL’13, Montreal, Canada. Sept 26th 2013
2013
Hawwari, A.; Zaghouani, W.; O'Gorman, T.; Badran, A.; Diab, M.

"Building a Lexical Semantic Resource for Arabic Morphological Patterns," Communications, Signal Processing, and their Applications (ICCSPA), 2013, vol., no., pp.1,6, 12-14 Feb. 2013.
2013
Wajdi Zaghouani

RENAR: A Rule-Based Arabic Named Entity Recognition System. ACM Trans. Asian Lang. Inf. Process. 11(1): 2 (2012).
2012
Wajdi Zaghouani, Abdelati Hawwari and Mona Diab.

A Pilot PropBank Annotation for Quranic Arabic. In Proceedings of the first workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature, NAACL-HLT 2012, Montreal, Canada
2012
Mohammed Maamouri, Wajdi Zaghouani, Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, Dave Graff and Mike Ciul

Developing ARET: An NLP-based Educational Tool Set for Arabic Reading Enhancement. In Proceedings of The 7th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, NAACL-HLT 2012, Montreal, Canada
2012
Wajdi Zaghouani

Étude sur la composition des noms de personnes dans la langue arabe. In proceedings of the 25th Journées de linguistique de Laval. 9-11 March 2011, Laval University , Québec, Canada.
2011
Wajdi Zaghouani , Mona Diab , Aous Mansouri, Sameer Pradhan and Martha Palmer

The Revised Arabic PropBank. In proceedings of the 4th Linguistic Annotation workshop ACL held in Uppsala. July 15-16 2010
2010
Eric Atwell, Kais Dukes, Abdul-Baquee Sharaf, Nizar Habash, Bill Louw,Bayan Abu Shawar,Tony McEnery,Wajdi Zaghouani, Mahmoud El- Haj

Understanding the Quran: a new Grand Challenge for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. In Grand Challenges in Computing Research for 2010 and beyond. part of ACM-BCS Visions of Computer Science conference. 13-16 April 2010, Edinburgh University
2010
Mohamed Maamouri, Ann Bies, Seth Kulick, Wajdi Zaghouani, Dave Graff and Mike Ciul

From Speech to Trees: Applying Treebank Annotation to Arabic Broadcast News. In Proceedings of LREC 2010, Valetta, Malta, May 17-23, 2010.
2010
Wajdi Zaghouani, Bruno Pouliquen, Mohamed Ebrahim and Ralf Steinberger

Adapting a resource-light highly multilingual Named Entity Recognition system to Arabic. In Proceedings of LREC 2010, Valetta, Malta, May 17-23, 2010.
2010
Wajdi Zaghouani

L'intégration d'un outil de repérage d'entités nommées pour la langue arabe dans un système de veille. Session Démo, TALN 2010, Montréal, 19-23 juillet 2010
2010
Mona Diab, Aous Mansouri, Martha Palmer, Olga Babko-Malaya,Wajdi Zaghouani, Ann Bies, Mohammed Maamouri

A Pilot Arabic Propbank; LREC 2008, Marrakech, Morocco, May 28-30, 2008
2008
J. VÉRONIS, O. HAMON, C. AYACHE, R. BELMOUHOUB, O. KRAIF, D. LAURENT, T.M.H. NGUYEN, N. SEMMAR, F. STUCK, W. ZAGHOUANI

La campagne d'évaluation ARCADE II. In Chaudiron, S. & Choukri, K. (Eds.) L'évaluation des technologies de traitement de la langue (pp 47-69). Paris: Hermes Science Publications, IC2 Cognition Collection. ISBN 978-2-7462-1992-2.
2008
Bruno Pouliquen, Marco Kimler, Ralf Steinberger, Camelia Ignat, Tamara Oellinger, Ken Blackler, FlavioFuart, Wajdi Zaghouani, Anna Widiger, Ann-Charlotte Forslund, Clive Best

Geocoding multilingual texts: Recognition, Disambiguation and Visualisation. Proceedings of the (LREC'2006), pp. 53-58. Genoa, Italy, 24-26 May 2006
2006
Yun-Chuang Chiao, Olivier Kraif, Dominique Laurent, Thi Minh Huyen Nguyen, Nasredine Semmar, François Stuck, Jean Véronis, Wajdi Zaghouani

Evaluation of multilingual text alignment systems: the ARCADE II project. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'2006). Genoa, Italy, 24-26 May 2006
2006
Yun-Chuang Chiao, Olivier Kraif, Dominique Laurent, Thi Minh Huyen Nguyen, Nasredine Semmar, François Stuck, Jean Véronis, Wajdi Zaghouani

Evaluation of multilingual text alignment systems: the ARCADE II project. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'2006). Genoa, Italy, 24-26 May 2006
2006
Pouliquen Bruno, Ralf Steinberger, Camelia Ignat, Irina Temnikova, Anna Widiger, Wajdi Zaghouani & Jan Žižka

Multilingual person name recognition and transliteration. Journal CORELA - Cognition, Représentation, Langage. Numéros spéciaux, Le traitement lexicographique des noms propres. Available online at: http://edel.univ- poitiers.fr/corela/document.php?id=490.
2005

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