Prof. Mona T. Diab

Mona Diab is Principal Scientist at Amazon AWS AI Deep Learning in Seattle, WA, USA. She is also Professor of Computational Linguistics and NLP in the Department of Computer Science, George Washington University (GW), and founder and Director of the NLP lab CARE4Lang at George Washington University. Her research interests include cross linguistic modelling and multilingual processing, computational lexical semantics, social media processing, information extraction & text analytics, machine translation, resource building, and computational socio-pragmatics. Mona has more than 200 scientific publications and she serves as acting editor for several of the community’s top scientific journals such as TACL and CSL.

Title : Low resource scenarios: challenges and opportunities

With the advent of social media, we are witnessing an exponential growth in unstructured data online. A huge amount of this data is in fact in languages other than English. Some of these languages have rich automated resources and processing tools, but the majority of the languages in the world are considered low resource despite presence online. In this talk, I will address the problem of processing low resource languages.  I will present some of our solutions for language identification, information extraction, machine translation, and resource creation exploiting rich languages via cross linguistic modeling. Such techniques can also be cast for cross genre and cross domain challenges.