Bashar Alhafni

Aloha! I am a computer science Ph.D. student at NYU and I am advised by Professor Nizar Habash.

Previously, I was a computer science graduate student at USC and a graduate student researcher at ISI where I worked with Professors Jonathan May and Nanyun Peng on machine translation and event relation extraction. Before that, I studied computer science and math at the University of Bridgeport.

My research interests are in natural language processing and machine learning, with a focus on natural language generation tasks such as grammatical error correction, text rewriting, and simplification. Specifically, I am interested in developing human-centric natural language generation systems to provide explainable and personalized outputs.

News

10/2023 Our paper, Advancements in Arabic Grammatical Error Detection and Correction: An Empirical Investigation, has been accepted to EMNLP 2023!
05/2023 Started my research internship at Grammarly, where I will be working on personalizing LLMs under the supervision of Vipul Raheja, Dhruv Kumar, and Vivek Kulkarni!
05/2023 Our paper demo paper, The User-Aware Arabic Gender Rewriter, has been accepted to the GITT workshop at EAMT 2023.
10/2022 Our paper on, CrisisLTLSum: A Benchmark for Local Crisis Event Timeline Extraction and Summarization, has been accepted to the EMNLP 2022 Findings! This was a result of my summer internship at Dataminr.
10/2022 Our paper on, Arabic Word-level Readability Visualization for Assisted Text Simplification, has been accepted to the EMNLP 2022 system demonstrations track!
07/2022 We are running a shared task on Gender Rewriting at WANLP in EMNLP 2022. Check it out and participate!
05/2022 Our paper on, Zero-shot Cross-Linguistic Learning of Event Semantics, has been accepted to INLG 2022!
04/2022 Our paper on, User-Centric Gender Rewriting, has been accepted to NAACL 2022 main conference as a special theme paper!
04/2022 Our work on, The Arabic Parallel Gender Corpus 2.0: Extensions and Analyses, will appear in LREC 2022!
03/2022 I am part of the EMNLP 2022 Local Organizing Committee. Feel free to email me any local organization questions you may have.
01/2022 I will be spending my summer at Dataminr as a research intern under the mentorship of Joel Tetreault.
10/2021 Our new preprint, The Arabic Parallel Gender Corpus 2.0: Extensions and Analyses, is now available on arXiv.
06/2021 I passed my Ph.D. qualifying exam 🥳! Thanks to my committee members: Profs. Kyunghyun Cho, Nizar Habash, He He, and Julia Stoyanovich.
02/2021 Our paper on, The Interplay of Variant, Size, and Task Type in Arabic Pre-trained Language Models, has been accepted to 6th Arabic NLP workshop (WANLP), EACL 2021.
01/2021 I will be giving an invited talk at ETH Zürich’s NLP Reading Group (Host: Ryan Cotterell).
10/2020 Our paper on, Gender-Aware Reinflection using Linguistically Enhanced Neural Models, has been accepted to the second workshop on gender bias in NLP (GeBNLP), COLING 2020.
04/2020 I will be joining NYU as a computer science Ph.D. student in the Fall.
Let’s meetup and talk about NLP research if you’re in NYC!
02/2020 Our paper, CAMeL Tools: An Open Source Python Toolkit for Arabic Natural Language Processing, has been accepted to LREC 2020.
06/2019 I will be live-tweeting sessions 3D and 7D on Machine Translation at NAACL 2019.
03/2019 I will be attending NAACL 2019 in Minneapolis to present our paper on Contextualized Word Embeddings Enhanced Event Temporal Relation Extraction for Story Understanding.