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! |
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| 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. |