Background

I joined Microsoft Innovation Laboratory in Cairo (CMIC) in October 2008 as a Development Team Lead. Prior to joining Microsoft, I had a pretty long but challeging journey at Sakhr software, a company specializing 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, passing by a broad spectrum of NLP components for 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 Arabic<>English 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.

Professional Activities

Member of the program committee for the workshop “Arabic & Local Languages" at LREC2008 Marakech.
Member of the program committee for "The 6th International Conference on Informatics and Systems", 2008, EGYPT
Member of the program committee for the workshop “Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages, ACL 2007” .
Member of the program committee for MT SUMMIT 2007
Participated in NIST 2005,2006 and 2008 for MT Evaluation, Washington DC
Member of the program committee for MT SUMMIT 2005
Participated in AMTA 2004, Georgetown University, Washington DC
Member of the Program Committee for the Workshop : Arabic Language Processing Text & Speech, JEP-TALN 2004
Member of the scientific committee at NEMLAR workshop2004, Cairo
Member of the Program Committee for the Workshop : MT for Semitic Languages, MT Summit 2003
Member of the Scientific Committee for the Workshop : Arabic Language Resources (LR) and Evaluation , LREC 2002 Status and Prospects
Member of ACL

Publications

Achraf Chalabi and Hany Gerges, Romanized Arabic Transliteration, in CoLing 2012, WTIM02, 2012
Achraf Chalabi, Sakhr Arabic Monolingual Lexicon, NEMLAR, 2004
Achraf Chalabi, Elliptic personal pronoun and Machine Translation in Arabic, JEP-TALN, 2004
Achraf Chalabi, Challenges in Arabic Natural Language Processing, Multilingual Technology & Computing, issue 51, in Multilingual Technology & Computing, 2002
Achraf Chalabi, Sakhr Web-based Arabic-English MT engine, ARABIC Language Processing: Status and Prospects , ACL , Toulouse, 2001
Achraf Chalabi, MT-Based Transparent Arabization of the Internet TARJIM.COM, AMTA, 2000
Achraf Chalabi, Software Development in Egypt: New Technology & Career Trends, AIP, in Arab Information Project at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, March 1998
Achraf Chalabi, Sakhr Arabic-English Computer-Aided Translation System, AMTA, 1998