DEI & Mentorship
My journey in NLP started with my interest in my native Moroccan Darija, an indigenous language spoken by over 30 million people, yet underrepresented in language technology with very few resources. My Bachelor's thesis created Moroccan Darija linguistic resources, and that commitment now runs through my work: co-founding an affinity group for North African researchers, mentoring people new to NLP research, and bringing NLP to wider and underserved audiences.
North Africans in NLP
An affinity group I co-founded for people of North African descent and/or based in North Africa who share an interest in NLP research. Our aim is to build community, raise the visibility of North African researchers across the NLP and AI community, celebrate their work, and openly discuss the challenges of doing research from the region. We held a panel discussion at EMNLP 2020, ran social and affinity events at COLING 2020, EACL 2021, NAACL 2021, ACL 2021, and NAACL 2022, and organized an affinity workshop for North Africans in ML at NeurIPS 2022.
Outreach & workshops
I regularly organize tutorials and workshops to bring NLP to wider and underserved audiences, and I co-organize the ArabicNLP Conference (since 2023).
Mentorship
I'm passionate about democratizing not just NLP technology, but NLP research itself, co-authoring papers with students and recent graduates who are new to the field.
I have also served on graduate committees, including the Master's thesis of Aiman Belmokhtar (University of Miami) on Moroccan Darija text-to-speech.
Want to collaborate?
Email me your CV, your research idea, how it aligns with my research interests, and how much time you can contribute. I'm particularly excited to work with people who are new to NLP research but have strong NLP engineering and coding skills.
hello@drkhalil.ai →