Badr M. Abdullah

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Hey there 👋🏼 I’m Badr, an AI researcher and Language Technology expert.

My work focuses on applying machine learning to various problems in Natural Language Processing [text modality 📝] and Speech Processing [audio modality 💬]. From text to speech, I have always been excited about broadening language technology to many of the under-represented languages of the world.

I have a PhD in Computational Linguistics from Saarland University. My PhD dissertation introduced novel methods for understanding the representation of speech variability in deep neural networks, providing an interdisciplinary perspective that connects sociolinguistics and machine learning. Before that, I completed my Master in the LCT program with the prestigious Erasmus Mundus scholarship funded by the European Commission.

I am a currently working as a researcher in the Language Science and Technology Department at Saarland University. I work with Dietrich Klakow and Bernd Möbius.

I am always excited to chat and learn more about …

  • AI Applications for Social Good 🍏 Whether we like it or not, AI will impact many aspects of our lives. So how do we steer AI technologies to make a positive social impact? From education to healthcare, what are the possibilities and challenges?

  • Language Technology and Digital Humanities 📚 Our ancestors have left us a wealth of knowledge. Can intelligent language technologies help preserve this rich cultural heritage? How can we make humankind’s historical wisdom accessible and searchable for all curious minds?

  • Language Processing in Humans and Machines 🧠 Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at processing and generating natural language. Can they teach us something about language processing in the human brain? Can our linguistic theories inspire us to build computational frameworks for neural network interpretability?

  • Multilinguality and Language Variation 🌐 Not all languages are fairly represented in today’s language technology. How can we develop language technologies that are more inclusive and celebrate the linguistic diversity of humankind?

 

news

Jun 5, 2024 Two papers accepted in Interspeech 2024 in Kos, Greece! 🎉
Mar 1, 2024 I successfuly defended my PhD 🎯 🥳 🎓
Aug 23, 2023 I presented our paper in Interspeech 2023 in Dublin! :shamrock: :ireland: :beers:
Jul 19, 2023 PhD thesis submitted :sparkles: :partying_face: :confetti_ball:
May 6, 2023 I presented our extended abstract in SIGTYP workshop during EACL 2023 conference in Dubrovnik! :croatia: :european_castle:

selected publications

  1. An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Self-supervised Discrete Representations of Speech
    Badr M. Abdullah, Mohammed Maqsood Shaik, Bernd Möbius, and 1 more author
    In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH, 2023
  2. Information-Theoretic Characterization of Vowel Harmony: A Cross-Linguistic Study on Word Lists
    Julius Steuer, Badr M. Abdullah, Johann-Mattis List, and 1 more author
    In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP (SIGTYP), May 2023
  3. How Familiar Does That Sound? Cross-Lingual Representational Similarity Analysis of Acoustic Word Embeddings
    Badr M. Abdullah, Iuliia Zaitova, Tania Avgustinova, and 2 more authors
    In Proceedings of the Fourth BlackboxNLP Workshop on Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP, Nov 2021
  4. SIGTYP 2021 Shared Task: Robust Spoken Language Identification
    Elizabeth Salesky, Badr M. Abdullah, Sabrina Mielke, and 6 more authors
    In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Typology and Multilingual NLP (SIGTYP), Jun 2021