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Meriem BELOUCIF مريم بلوصيف

Assistant Professor

Faculty of Languages
Departement of Linguistics and Philology
Uppsala University
meriem (dot) beloucif (at) lingfil (dot) uu (dot) se

I am an assistant professor in Computational Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics and Philology at Uppsala University. My current research focuses on neural machine translation and lexical semantics in large models, notably in low-resource languages. Before, I worked on comparative QA at the LT Group at Hamburg University and spent a year at Copenhagen University working on semantic parsing and machine translation. I did my PhD at HKUST, Hong Kong on machine translation.

Research interests

NLP for Low-Resource Languages, Question Answering, Neural Machine Translation, Semantic parsing, Semantic Role Labeling

Education

  • 2013-2018: PhD in Computer Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, China.
  • 2008-2010: Master in Softwares Engineering, University of Science and Technology Houari Boumedienne (USTHB), Algiers, Algeria.
  • 2005-2008: Bachelor in Academic computer science, University of science and technology Houari Boumedienne (USTHB), Algiers, Algeria.

    • Teaching

  • Spring 2023: Lecturer: Information Retrieval, Uppsala University.
  • Autumn 2022: Theme Supervisor: Research and Development, Uppsala University.
  • Autumn 2022: Lecturer: Machine Translation, Uppsala University.
  • Spring 2019: Guest lecturer, Machine Translation, Hamburg University.
  • Fall 2018: Guest lecturer, Natural Language Processing, University of Copenhagen.
  • Fall 2018: Guest lecturer, Introduction to Computer Science, University of Copenhagen.
  • Fall 2016: COMP4911 IT Entrepreneurship, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
  • Spring 2016: COMP3211 Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
  • Fall 2015: COMP4221 Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
  • Spring 2015: COMP4211 Machine Learning, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
  • Fall 2014: COMP1022Q Introduction to Computing with Excel VBA, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
  • Spring 2012: Project Management at the University of Boumerdes, Algeria.
  • Fall 2012: Logic and Lambda Calculus at the University of Blida, Algeria.

    • Shared Tasks' zization

  • ACL 2023: SemEval: AfriSenti-SemEval Shared Task 12: AfriSenti-SemEval: Sentiment Analysis for African Languages..
  • CLEF 2020, 2021, 2022: Touché@CLEF.
  • ESWC 2022: The 7th Natural Language Interfaces for the Web of Data (NLIWoD) Workshop.

    • Committee Work

  • 2021-now: Member of the ACL Professional Conduct Committee.
  • 2014-now: Active reviewer for all CL large conferences, multiple workshops and shared tasks.
  • 2020-2022: Co-chair and active member of the affinity group North Africans in NLP (EMNLP 2020, COLING 2020, EACL 2021, NAACL 2021, ACL 2021, NAACL 2022)
  • 2022: Co-chair and active member of the affinity group North Africans in Machine Learning @NeurIPS2022.

    • Grants and Awards

  • 2019: Awarded a 17K Euros Grant for Organizing a Workshop from Hamburg University.
  • 2019: Awarded Amazon AWS Grant Worth 20K Euros.
  • 2018: Awarded the NVIDIA GPU Grant Program.
  • 2018: Passed the thesis defence examination.
  • 2016: Travel Award to attend ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics).
  • 2016: Grace Hopper Scholarship.
  • 2016: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Scholarship.
  • 2015: Google Anita Borg Scholarship.
  • 2015: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Scholarship.
  • 2014: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Scholarship.
  • 2014: Google Grant Travel Award to attend ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics).
  • 2013: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Scholarship.
  • 2011: Ranked first in the Algerian national selection for graduate school entrance.
  • 2010: Ranked fourth over two hundred during the Master studies.
  • 2008: Ranked third over eighty during the Bachelor studies.

    • Publications

      • Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Idris Abdulmumin, Seid Muhie Yimam, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Ibrahim Sa'id Ahmad, Nedjma Ousidhoum, Abinew Ayele, Saif M Mohammad, Meriem BELOUCIF, Sebastian Ruder. SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval): arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.06845. 2023.
      • Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Idris Abdulmumin, Abinew Ali Ayele, Nedjma Ousidhoum, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Seid Muhie Yimam, Ibrahim Sa'id Ahmad, Meriem BELOUCIF, Saif Mohammad, Sebastian Ruder, Oumaima Hourrane, Pavel Brazdil, Felermino Dário Mário António Ali, Davis Davis, Salomey Osei, Bello Shehu Bello, Falalu Ibrahim, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Samuel Rutunda, Tadesse Belay, Wendimu Baye Messelle, Hailu Beshada Balcha, Sisay Adugna Chala, Hagos Tesfahun Gebremichael, Bernard Opoku, Steven Arthur. Afrisenti: A twitter sentiment analysis benchmark for african languages: arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.08956. 2023.
      • Alexander Bondarenko, Maik Fröbe, Johannes Kiesel, Shahbaz Syed, Timon Gurcke, Meriem BELOUCIF, Alexander Panchenko, Chris Biemann, Benno Stein, Henning Wachsmuth, Martin Potthast, Matthias Hagen Overview of touché 2022: argument retrieval.
      • Timon Gurcke, Meriem BELOUCIF, Alexander Panchenko, Chris Biemann, Benno Stein, Henning Wachsmuth, Martin Potthast, Matthias Hagen Overview of Touché 2022: Argument Retrieval.
      • Meriem BELOUCIF, Seid Muhie Yimam, Steffen Stahlhacke, Chris Biemann. Elvis vs. M. Jackson: Who has More Albums? Classification and Identification of Elements in Comparative Questions. Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. 2022.
      • Meriem BELOUCIF and Chris Biemann. Probing Pre-trained Language Models for Semantic Attributes and their Values. Findings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
      • Viktoriia Chekalina, Alexander Bondarenko, Chris Biemann, Meriem BELOUCIF, Varvara Logacheva, Alexander Panchenko. Which is better for deep learning: python or MATLAB? Answering comparative questions in natural language. Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations.
      • Meriem BELOUCIF and Chris Biemann. How can BERT Understand High-level Semantics? Is Neuro-Symbolic SOTA still a myth for Natural Language Inference? The first workshop.
      • Alexander Bondarenko, Alexander Panchenko,Meriem BELOUCIF, Chris Biemann, Matthias Hagen Answering comparative questions with arguments. Datenbank-Spektrum 20, 155-160
      • Cezar Sas, Meriem Beloucif, Anders Søgaard. WikiBank: Using Wikidata to Improve Multilingual Frame-Semantic Parsing. The 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC). Marseille, France.
      • Alexander Bondarenko, Matthias Hage, Meriem Beloucif , Chris Biemann, Alexander Panchenko (2020): Answering Comparative Questions withWeb-based Arguments. Proceedings of AAAI 2020 Workshop on Interactive and Conversational Recommendation Systems, New York, USA.
      • Alexander Bondarenko, Matthias Hagen, Martin Potthast, Henning Wachsmuth, Meriem Beloucif, Chris Biemann, Alexander Panchenko, and Benno Stein. Touché: First Shared Task on Argument Retrieval. In Advances in Information Retrieval. 42th European Conference on IR Research (ECIR 2020), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, April 2020. Springer.
      • Meriem BELOUCIF, Ana Valeria Gonzalez, Marcel Bollmann and Soegaard Anders. Naive regularizers for low-resource neural machine translation. Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing 2019. Borovets, Bulgaria.
      • Meriem BELOUCIF and Dekai WU. SRL for low resource languages isn't needed for semantic SMT. 21st Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT 2018). Alicante: May 2018.
      • Meriem BELOUCIF and Dekai WU. Injecting a Semantic Objective Function into Early Stage Learning of Spoken Language Translation. Sixth IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT 2016). San Diego: Dec 2016.
      • Meriem BELOUCIF, Markus SAERS and Dekai WU. Improving word alignment for low resource languages using English monolingual SRL. Sixth Workshop on Hybrid Approaches to Translation (HyTra-6). Osaka, Japan: Dec 2016.
      • Meriem BELOUCIF and Dekai WU. Injecting a Semantic Objective Function into Early Stage Learning of Spoken Language Translation. Oriental COCOSDA 2016, 19th International Conference of the Oriental Chapter of the International Committee for the Co-ordination and Standardization of Speech Databases and Assessment Techniques (O-COCOSDA 2016). Bali, Indonesia: Oct 2016.
      • Meriem BELOUCIF and Dekai WU. Driving inversion transduction grammar induction with semantic evaluation. 5th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2016), at ACL 2016, 55-63. Berlin: Aug 2016.
      • Meriem BELOUCIF and Dekai WU. A semantically confidence-weighted ITG induction algorithm. 3rd International Workshop on Semantic Machine Learning (SML 2016), at IJCAI 2016. New York: Jul 2016.
      • Meriem BELOUCIF, Markus SAERS, and Dekai WU. Improving Semantic SMT via Soft Semantic Role Label Constraints on ITG Alignments . Machine Translation Summit XV, Miami, Florida: Oct 2015.
      • Meriem BELOUCIF, Chi-kiu LO, and Dekai WU. Improving MEANT Based Semantically Tuned SMT. 11th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2014), 34-41. Lake Tahoe, California: Dec 2014.
      • Dekai WU, Chi-kiu LO, Meriem BELOUCIF and Markus SAERS. Better Semantic Frame Based MT Evaluation via Inversion Transduction Grammars. Proceedings of SSST-8, Eighth Workshop on Syntax, Semantics and Structure in Statistical Translation (at EMNLP 2014), 22-33. Doha: Oct 2014.
      • Chi-kiu LO, Meriem BELOUCIF, Markus SAERS, and Dekai WU. XMEANT: Better semantic MT evaluation without reference translations. 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2014), 765-771. Baltimore, Maryland: Jun 2014.
      • Chi-kiu LO,Meriem BELOUCIF, and Dekai WU. "Improving machine translation into Chinese by tuning against Chinese MEANT". 10th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2013). Heidelberg, Germany: Dec 2013.
      • Dekai WU, Karteek ADDANKI, Markus SAERS, and Meriem BELOUCIF. Learning to Freestyle: Hip Hop Challenge-Response Induction via Transduction Rule Segmentation. 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2013), 102-112. Seattle: Oct 2013.

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