Carnegie Mellon Qatar professor is key organizer for worldwide conference in Natural Language Processing and Generative AI

Carnegie Mellon Qatar professor is key organizer for worldwide conference in Natural Language Processing and Generative AI

Doha, Qatar: Houda Bouamor served as a key organizer for the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP2023), an event that drew about 4000 world global experts in the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP), a subfield of artificial intelligence. Bouamor is an associate teaching professor of information systems at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, and an expert in NLP.

This year, the conference took place in Singapore. Bouamor was one of the program chairs for the conference, and Kemal Oflazer, a CMU-Q teaching professor of computer science and an expert in Turkish NLP, served as an ethics chair.

CMU-Q is a Qatar Foundation partner university.

“There were so many interesting researchers and practitioners at the conference that provided valuable insight into the possibilities, and the challenges of processing human languages. This was particularly pertinent given the surge of Generative AI, a crucial task within our field” said Bouamor.

“The consistent theme throughout was that NLP should be human-centered. Researchers are looking at novel ways that generative AI and NLP can improve people’s lives, like detecting mental health issues, providing accessibility for the hearing-impaired, and strengthening cultural identity in less represented languages.”

Michael Trick, dean of CMU-Q, is a strong proponent of