Houda Bouamor

About Me

I am an Associate Teaching Professor and Associate Area Head of the Information Systems Department at CMU-Q. I am also affiliated with the CAMeL Lab (Computational Approaches to Modeling Language Lab) at NYU Abu Dhabi, where I collaborate with Nizar Habash on several projects.

My area of research is Artificial Intelligence, specifically Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics. I primarily focus on Arabic and Arabic dialect processing across orthography, morphology, syntax, semantics, lexicons, and corpora. I also work on machine translation, dialogue systems, and multilingual AI. A strong theme in my research is using AI for social good, ensuring that technology contributes to equity, inclusion, and meaningful societal impact.

I earned my PhD in Computer Science (Computational Linguistics) from Paris-Sud University, France, where I worked on paraphrase alignment under the supervision of Anne Vilnat and Aurélien Max. Before that, I completed my M.Sc. in Computer Science at the Paris-Est Marne-La-Vallée University and my B.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Manouba, Tunisia.

Since January 2025, I serve as the Secretary of SIGARAB, the ACL Special Interest Group for Arabic NLP, where I actively support the growth and cohesion of this community. I served as the Program Committee (PC) Chair of EMNLP 2023 and as the General Chair of the Arabic NLP Conference 2022. In addition, I have held the role of Senior Area Chair for several leading international conferences, including ACL 2025, AAAI 2026, LREC 2026, and EACL 2026.

📄 Curriculum Vitae » Dissertation »

Quotes I Like

“The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.”
— Edsger Dijkstra, 1984

لا تخجل من السؤال عن شيء تجهله، فخير لك أن تكون جاهلا مرة من أن تظل على جهلك طول العمر
— يوسف السباعي

Research Interests

Natural Language Processing (NLP) & Generative AI
Arabic dialect processing & low-resource languages
Machine Translation (statistical & neural)
Dialogue Systems
Automatic Essay Scoring & Educational AI
Bias and Fairness in AI systems
Applied Deep Learning for multilingual data
AI for Social Good

Selected Projects

Dimension-Specific Automated Scoring of Arabic Essays (2023–2026) – Developing the first automated multi-dimensional essay scoring system for Arabic writing proficiency.
TartanBotQ (2024–2025) – Designing a university advising chatbot for CMU-Q students using conversational AI.
Qatar Linguistic Map (2020–2024) – Large-scale initiative documenting and analyzing Qatari dialect variation.
MADAR Project (2017–2020) – Created one of the largest multi-dialectal corpora and lexicons for Arabic dialect processing.

Recent Publications

Bouamor, H., Gongora-Svartzman, G., Heimann, L., Huang, S. (2025). Evaluating GenAI’s Effectiveness for Students with Varied Programming Backgrounds in a Software Development Course. SIGCSE TS 2025.
Dikshit, M., Bouamor, H., Habash, N. (2024). Investigating Gender Bias in STEM Job Advertisements. GeBNLP 2024.
Micallef, K., Habash, N., Borg, C., Eryani, F., Bouamor, H. (2024). Cross-Lingual Transfer from Related Languages. EACL 2024.
Bouamor, H., Pino, J., Bali, K. (2023). Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023.

📚 Full list: Google Scholar

Teaching

Courses I regularly teach at CMU-Q:

67-272: Application Design & Development
67-341: Generative AI & Governance: Building Responsible Systems
67-364: Practical Data Science
67-212: Natural Language Processing with Python
67-426: Data Science Capstone

Service & Leadership

Secretary of SIGARAB (ACL Special Interest Group for Arabic NLP)
Senior Area Chair, ACL 2025
Senior Area Chair, AAAI 2026
Senior Area Chair, LREC 2026
Senior Area Chair, EACL 2026
Program Chair, ArabicNLP 2024
Program Chair, EMNLP 2023
General Chair, WANLP 2022
Co-organizer, NADI Shared Task (2019–2024)
Associate Editor, Frontiers in AI: Language and Computation

Contact

📍 CMU-Q, Education City, Doha, Qatar
✉️ hbouamor@cmu.edu