Achraf Chalabi

About

I’m an Architect at Microsoft Research, I’m particularly interested in:

• Natural Language Processing
• Information Extraction
• Machine Translation
• Speech Processing

I joined Microsoft Innovation Laboratory in Cairo (CMIC) in October 2008 as a Dev Lead. Prior to joining Microsoft, I had a pretty long and productive journey at Sakhr Software, the leading company in Arabic technologies including NLP, OCR, Speech and Search. At Sakhr, I gained an extensive experience in Arabic/English NLP, starting with the implementation of the first Arabic Morphological Analyzer, ending with the R&D of a two-way Arabic-English speech-to-speech translation system, and in between covering a broad spectrum of NLP tasks targeting both Arabic and English languages, including the Lexicalizer, Parser, POS tagger, Analysis and Transfer Grammars, and many of their direct applications such as the Diacritizer, Transliterator, Text Mining and ArabicEnglish Machine Translation.
I was granted a US Patent in the field of NLP and more precisely in Word Sense Disambiguation. I was born in France, grew up in Zaire, and graduated from the computer engineering department at Ain Shams university, Cairo.