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
| 09/2024 | Gave a talk at the National Research Council Canada (NRC-CNRC) on Controlled User-Centric Natural Language Generation for Morphologically Rich Languages: The Case of Arabic. |
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| 09/2024 | Presenting a tutorial at COLING 2025 on LLMs in Education: Novel Perspectives, Challenges, and Opportunities with Sowmya Vajjala, Stefano Bannò, Kaushal Kumar Maurya, and Ekaterina Kochmar (tutorial website). |
| 04/2024 | Co-organizing the 2nd Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (ArabicNLP 2024) at ACL 2024! |
| 03/2024 | Our paper on, The Arabic Text Simplification Corpus, has been accepted to LREC-COLING 2024! |
| 02/2024 | Our paper, mEdIT: Multilingual Text Editing via Instruction Tuning, has been accepted to NAACL 2024! |
| 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. |