Bashar Alhafni
Hi! I am an Assistant Professor of Natural Language Processing at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). My research focuses on Arabic NLP, with a particular interest in building human-centered language technologies. My work spans a range of areas, including grammatical error detection and correction, dialectal Arabic text normalization, text simplification, readability assessment, machine translation, and controlled natural language generation. A core motivation behind my work is to develop Arabic NLP tools that support education and promote social good.
Before joining MBZUAI, I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University (NYU), where I was advised by Prof. Nizar Habash.
My dissertation focused on controlled Arabic natural language generation with applications in AI for education and social impact.
Before that, I earned my Master’s from the University of Southern California (USC), where I worked at ISI on low-resource machine translation and event relation extraction. I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Bridgeport.
In addition to my academic work, I have held applied NLP research roles at Grammarly and Dataminr, where I contributed to projects in personalized text generation, summarization, and multilingual NLP.
I am always looking to work with motivated students and postdocs. Feel free to reach out if you are interested in applying to MBZUAI.
News
| 07/2025 | I am excited to join MBZUAI as an Assistant Professor of Natural Language Processing. I am currently looking for students and postdocs to join my lab! |
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| 05/2025 | Our paper on Enhancing Text Editing for Grammatical Error Correction: Arabic as a Case Study has been accepted to ACL. |
| 04/2025 | I have successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation titled Controlled Natural Language Generation for Morphologically Rich Languages: The Case of Arabic. Many thanks so my committee members: Ted Birscoe, Kyunghyun Cho, Mona Diab, Nizar Habash, He He, and Julia Stoyanovich. |
| 04/2025 | Our paper, ARWI: Arabic Write and Improve, won the diverstiy award at the In2Writing workshop at NAACL 2025 🏆 |
| 01/2025 | Co-organizing the BEA 2025 workshop at ACL 2025. |
| 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. |
| 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! |