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Research Statement

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Prof. Khaled major research interests include Computational Linguistics; in particular, Arabic Natural Language Processing (In Arabic: معالجة اللغة العربية). As more and more Arabic textual information becomes available through the Web in homes and businesses, via Internet and Intranet services, there is an urgent need for technologies and tools to process the relevant information. Khaled is inspired by the dual goals of 1) gaining novel insights into analysis and synthesis of written Arabic through NLP, and 2) developing Arabic NLP systems capable of providing assistance in translating Arabic text, teaching Arabic and providing feedback to learners, retrieving relevant Arabic documents, or extracting information from Arabic web contents, and Arabic Question Answering. Khaled’s early work explored how rule-based approach can be used in Arabic processing. Sometimes rule-based approach gives better results over corpus-based approach when the data is sparse. Nevertheless, the rule-based approach has successfully been used to distinguish between well-formed and ill-formed input using linguistic (morphological and syntactic)knowledge which, in applications such as intelligent tutoring systems, enables feedback elaboration that helps language learners to understand better their knowledge gap. Subsequently, he has led research focused on applying machine learning approaches to rule-based systems.

Khaled has long standing expertise in Arabic natural language processing. Arabic language is rich in morphology and complex in syntax which makes the Arabic NLP research a challenge. Due to lack of Arabic NLP tools he had to first develop tools that can be used in Arabic NLP applications. Khaled has worked on a number of related research areas that involves developing a set of tools at different analysis and generation levels: morphology, syntax, and(shallow) semantics. Some of these tools address to some extent another dimension of the three Arabic language varieties: Classical, Modern Standard, and (Egyptian) dialect. Whereas, some others address the well-formed and ill-formed input and providing detailed analyses and feedback of the user input.

Over the last two decades, Khaled has been contributing to a wide range of topics in Arabic NLP, including machine translation, parsing, spelling and grammatical checking, named entity recognition, and diacritization. Moreover, he has also worked on topics in knowledge-based systems using KADS knowledge engineering methodology, including expert systems building tools, expert systems development, and knowledge verification. Nevertheless, Khaled worked on health informatics topics, including context-aware knowledge modelling for decision support in E-Health and game-based learning. Furthermore, Khaled worked in educational topics, including intelligent tutoring, item banking, distance learning, and mobile learning. Khaled has been the leader of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) Research Group at the British University in Dubai, UAE, since established in 2004. The NLP group’s aim is to help overcome language barriers to improve access to information systems. The NLP Group is actively involved in basic and applied research projects. Funds are secured externally from national and international wide fund bodies and internally from the British University in Dubai. The technological scope of the NLP Group is the automatic processing of written natural language. Due to the importance of Arabic language, locally, regionally and worldwide, the NLP Group conducts research into the automatic processing of Arabic language, particularly those aspects related to the construction and exploitation of lexical resources, the lexical analysis and feedback within intelligent language tutoring systems, the extraction of information from documents, and the analysis of Arabic sentence by exploiting Treebank resources. Within these research lines, NLP Group focuses its attention on developing language processing tools, such as morphological and syntactical analyzers and generators, name entity extractors, and corpus processing tools. The scientific production and contribution result in high quality journal articles, communications and presentations at conferences, dissertations, and book chapters. Khaled’s plan for future development is, as an internationally recognized researcher in the field of Arabic NLP, to place great importance on the research needs including security of funding, recruitment of group members, opportunities for career development, and direction of the group’s research in topics that promote the research in the growing area of Arabic NLP.

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Publications & Research impact

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I publish my research in highly ranked international journals such as Computational Linguistics, Journal of Natural Language Engineering,  Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Computers in Human Behavior, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Expert Systems with Applications, Software-Practice & Experience, Journal of Information Science, Computer Assisted Language Learning, and European Journal of Scientific Research. I also publish in the well-known and high profile fully-referred conferences such as COLING, LREC, CICLing, IJCNN, FLAIRS, RANLP, IEEE NLP-KE, KMO, specialized workshops such as FSMNLP and CAASL, and workshops organized within EACL and ACL. See the Bibliometric indices of my scientific impact computed with Google Scholar Citations Or with Harzing’s publish and perish software under Author Impact Analysis with query Author’s name = “khaled shaalan”).  

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Research Projects

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I led, as a Principal Investigator & Co-Principal Investigator, a diverse set of funded research projects in machine translation, named entity recognition, information retrieval, parsing, intelligent language tutoring systems, health informatics, and expert systems. The research outcomes include quality publications in highly cited journals. The external fund body in these projects includes Microsoft/FAST search & Transfer Inc., Oslo, Norway, National Science Foundation, USA/MoHE Egypt, British Council Funded PMI 2 Connect – Research Co-operation in the Gulf States, UK, NRF, UAE. The international collaborators and external organizations, include Dr Petra Maier-Meyer, Microsoft/FAST search& Transfer, Germany, Dr Lori Levin, CMU, USA, and Dr Hissam Tawfik, Liverpool Hope University, UK, Dr Josef van Genabith, the Dublin City University, Ireland, Dr Pavel Pecina, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, Younes Samih, Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Germany, and Prof. Ali Farghaly, Stanford University, USA.

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Supervision

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I supervise MSc and PhD students in natural language engineering research on how to build tools and systems that can deal with Arabic language. I also supervise students in knowledge engineering on how to build innovative applications of AI for education, agriculture and business domains. My postgraduate supervisory, include 38 students undertaking (30) MSc’s and (8) PhD’s by research who have been awarded their degrees under my supervision. You can download dissertations of my students at BUiD from BSpace.

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TEACHING, Training & CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT

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I have a long experience in teaching in the field of Computer Science. My teaching experience has been diverse. I have taught computer science courses geared to undergraduate, diploma, pre-msater, and Msc students. I have been exposed to the Middle Eastern- and Western-style education. Beingresearch active, I am a strong believer in research informed teaching as ourstudents are faced with a changing world, demand for high skilled professionalsand flexible learning abilities. This can only be achieved through lifelonglearning and by being at the forefront of the developments in the field. I also have training experience as a trainer and organizer for courses related to computer programming languages and expert systems development for beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. 

As for curriculum development, I have taken leadership roles and actively participated in teams efforts to develop undergraduate and postgraduate programs. I have also played a significant role in reviewing and developing existing programs to ensure that they meet the expectations and needs of stakeholders.

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RESEARCH & PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES

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I have been actively and extensively supporting the local and international academic community. I have participated in seminars and invited talks locally and internationally, invited to international group meetings, invited to review papers from leading conferences and premier journals in my field, and invited for reviewing promotion applications to the ranks of Associate and Full Professor for applicants from both British and Arab Universities.

My professional activities include reviewing and refereeing research projects in my research area from local and international fund bodies such as “Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF)”, Qatar , New Your University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), UAE, “Information Technology Academic Collaboration (ITAC)” program projects, Egypt, and “Rashid bin Hamid Award for Culture and Science”, Umm Al Moumineen Association, Ajman, UAE. I have been a co-Guest Editor for special issues of international journals in my research area. I have organized and chaired a special track on my research filed in an international conference in the region. I also organized an International Symposium. I have served various leading conferences and workshops. I was the Program Committee Chair of The Seventh Asia Information Retrieval Societies Conference (AIRS 2011), The University of Wollongong in Dubai, UAE. I am also going to organize the first International Conference on Arabic Computational Linguistics (ACLing 2015), Nile University, Egypt.

Recently, I act as an external examiner for the Bachelor & Associate Degree program in Information Technology, Al Khawarizmi International College (KIC), Abu Dhabi& Al-Ain Campus, UAE. My responsibilities include, exam review, exam moderation, chairing exam board, course review, students & staff meetings, staff development, and course files audit. The contributions from the external examiner team, who are from UK universities, were highly appreciated by the Commission for Academic Accreditation, Ministry of Education , UAE.

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Academic Administration

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I have an extensive experience in educational administration and management with leadership responsibilities. My administrative experience ranges from headship of departments and programmes to membership of various University-wide and Faculty-wide committees and activities. The following quote is the general comment that the external examiner gave in his annual reports about the informatics programme which assures the significant success of the management and deployment of this programme under my headship:

“Having been external examiner at a number of UK Universities, I can confirm that the standards of teaching and assessment at BUiD are comparable to what I would expect of a UK University.”