Mona Diab facts for kids

Mona Talat Diab is a computer science professor and director of Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute. Previously, she was a professor at George Washington University and a research scientist with Facebook AI. Her research focuses on natural language processing, computational linguistics, cross lingual/multilingual processing, computational socio-pragmatics, Arabic language processing, and applied machine learning.

Education

Diab completed her M.Sc. in computer science with a major in machine learning and artificial intelligence at The George Washington University (1997) and her Ph.D. in computational linguistics at the University of Maryland, Linguistics Department and University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) in 2003, under the supervision of Philip Resnik. She was also a postdoctoral research scientist at Stanford University (2003–2005) under the mentorship of Dan Jurafsky, where she was a part of the Stanford NLP Group.

Career

After her postdoc at Stanford, Diab took a position as research scientist (principal investigator) at the Center for Computational Learning Systems (CCLS) in Columbia University, where she was also adjunct professor in the computer science department. In 2013 she joined the George Washington University as an associate professor, where she was promoted to full professor in 2017. Diab is the founder and director of the GW NLP lab CARE4Lang. Diab served as an elected faculty senator at Columbia University for 6 years (2007–2012) and an elected faculty senator at GW (2013–2014). She served the computational linguistics community as elected member, secretary and president of ACL SIGLEX (2005–2016) and elected president of ACL SIGSemitic. She currently serves as the elected VP-elect for ACL SIGDAT. In 2017 Diab joined Amazon AWS AI Deep Learning Group for Human Language Technologies, where she led the AWS Lex project for task oriented dialogue systems for enterprises. A couple of years later, she moved to Facebook AI as a research scientist. In the fall of 2023, she became the director of CMU's Language Technologies Institute -- the first full time director since the passing of its founder Jaime Carbonell.

Research

Diab's research interests include several areas in computational linguistics/natural language processing, like conversational AI, computational lexical semantics, multilingual and cross lingual processing, social media processing with an emphasis on computational socio- pragmatics, information extraction & text analytics, machine translation. Besides this, she also has special interests in Arabic NLP and low resource scenarios.

Diab co-established two research trends in the computational linguistics field, computational approaches to linguistic code switching in 2007 and semantic textual similarity in 2010.

Diab together with Nizar Habash and Owen Rambow, co-founded CADIM in 2005, a global reference point in Arabic dialect processing.

In 2012, Diab together with Eneko Agirre and Johan Bos, brought together two ACL communities SIGLEX and SIGSEM and established the 1st tier conference *SEM.

Awards and recognition

• Selected as one of top 150 leaders and visionaries in AI nationwide to participate in White House AI Summit in Government, Washington, D.C., US, September 2019

• March 2017: 3 Muslim Women in STEM You Should Know About, Teen Vogue, March 2017
• May 2017: Behind Every Strong Woman Is...Another Strong Woman: Ten women give thanks to the women who supported them on the way up. Elle, May 2017.
• Google Faculty Research Award – Tharwa++: Building a multidialectal Arabic Lexical Repository, (PI), 09.2015 –12.2016.
• Google Faculty Research Award – Nuanced Sentiment and Perspective Analysis for Arabic Social Media Text, (PI), 12.2014 –12.2015
• QNRF Best Poster Award – Ossama Obeid, Houda Bouamor, Wajdi Zaghouani, Mahmoud Ghoneim, Abdelati Hawwari, Mona Diab, Kemal Oflazer. (2016) MANDIAC: A Web-based Annotation System For Manual Arabic Diacritization. Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools, LREC 2016.
• Best Paper Award – Aminian, Maryam, Mahmoud Ghoneim, Mona Diab. (2015) Unsupervised False Friend Disambiguation Using Contextual Word Clusters and Parallel Word Alignments. In Proceedings of Workshop 9th Semantics Syntax Statistical Translation, NAACL 2015, Denver CO, US.