Natural Language Processing of Semitic Languages

Dr. Imed Zitouni is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft leading the Relevance Measurement Sciences group. Imed received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. with the highest-honors from the University-of-Nancy1 France.

In 1995, he obtained a MEng degree in computer science from ENSI in Tunisia. He is a senior member of IEEE, served as a member of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (99-11), the Information Officer of the ACL SIG on Semitic-Languages, associate editor of TALIP ACM journal and a member of ISCA and ACL. Imed served as chair and reviewing-committee-member of several conferences and journals and he is the author/co-author of more than 100 patents and papers in international conferences and journals. Imed's research interest is in the area of Multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP), including Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, Language modeling, etc. Imed has particular interest in advancing state of the art technology in the area of Semitic NLP, especially Arabic.

Imed's current research interest is in the area of Multilingual Information Retrieval focusing on the use of statistics and machine learning techniques to develop web scale offline and online metrics. He also working on the use of NLP to add a layer of semantics and understanding to search engines. Prior to joining Microsoft, Imed was a Senior Researcher at IBM for almost a decade, where he led several Multilingual NLP projects, including Arabic NLP, informatics extraction, semantic role labeling, language modeling, machine translation and speech recognition. Prior to IBM, Imed was a researcher at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, for almost half dozen years working on language modeling, speech recognition, spoken dialog systems and speech understanding. Imed also experiment the startup experience at DIALOCA in Paris, France, working on e-mail steering and language modeling and served as temporary assistant professor at the University ofNancy 1, France.