Bashar Talafha

Bashar Talafha

Ph.D. Student, UBC

About

👋 Hi there, I’m Bashar Talafha

I am currently a PhD student in the School of Information at the University of British Columbia (UBC). I’m supervised by Dr. Muhammad Abdul-mageed. My broad research interests are in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, Speech Technologies, and Multi-lingual/Multi-dialectal Information Processing. Previously, I earned a MSc and BSc degrees in Computer Science from the Jordan University of Science and Technology. Before starting my PhD journey, I was a Sr. Data Scientist and NLU team leader in the Artificial Intelligence department at Mawdoo3 Ltd., Amman-Jordan. Before Mawdoo3, I was a Researcher and Machine Learning Engineer at Samsung Electronics, Amman-Jordan.

Publications:

  • Talafha, B., Waheed, A., & Abdul-Mageed, M. (2023). N-Shot Benchmarking of Whisper on Diverse Arabic Speech Recognition. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.02902.

  • Waheed, A., Talafha, B., Sullivan, P., Elmadany, A., & Abdul-Mageed, M. (2023). VoxArabica: A Robust Dialect-Aware Arabic Speech Recognition System. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.11069.

  • Jarrar, M., Abdul-Mageed, M., Khalilia, M., Talafha, B., Elmadany, A., Hamad, N., & Omar, A. (2023). WojoodNER 2023: The First Arabic Named Entity Recognition Shared Task. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.16153.

  • Ebrahimi, A., Mager, M., Wiemerslage, A., Denisov, P., Oncevay, A., Liu, D., , Talafha, B., … & Kann, K. (2022, August). Findings of the Second AmericasNLP Competition on Speech-to-Text Translation. In NeurIPS 2022 Competition Track (pp. 217-232). PMLR.

  • Za’ter, M. E., & Talafha, B. (2022). Benchmarking and Improving Arabic Automatic Image Captioning Through The Use Of Multi-Task Learning Paradigm. arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.05474.

  • Talafha, B., Za’Ter, M. E., Suleiman, S., Al-Ayyoub, M., & Al-Kabi, M. N. (2021, November). sarcasm detection and quantification in arabic tweets. In 2021 IEEE 33rd International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI) (pp. 1121-1125). IEEE.

  • Talafha, B., Abuammar, A., & Al-Ayyoub, M. (2021). ATAR: Attention-based LSTM for Arabizi transliteration. International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (IJECE), 11(3), 2327-2334.

  • Seelawi, H., Tuffaha, I., Gzawi, M., Farhan, W., Talafha, B., Badawi, R., … & Al-Natsheh, H. (2021, April). Alue: Arabic language understanding evaluation. In Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (pp. 173-184).

  • Talafha, B., Ali, M., Za’ter, M. E., Seelawi, H., Tuffaha, I., Samir, M., … & Al-Natsheh, H. T. (2020). Multi-dialect arabic bert for country-level dialect identification. arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.05612.

  • Farhan, W., Talafha, B., Abuammar, A., Jaikat, R., Al-Ayyoub, M., Tarakji, A. B., & Toma, A. (2020). Unsupervised dialectal neural machine translation. Information Processing & Management, 57(3), 102181.

  • Talafha, B., Al-Ayyoub, M., Abuammar, A., & Jararweh, Y. (2019, November). Outperforming State-of-the-Art Systems for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis. In 2019 IEEE/ACS 16th International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA) (pp. 1-5). IEEE.

  • Talafha, B., Mohammad, A. S., Al-Ayyoub, M., Jararweh, Y., & Juola, P. (2019, November). Using a Hierarchical Softmax Based on the Huffman Coding Tree for Authenticating Arabic Tweets. In 2019 IEEE/ACS 16th International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA) (pp. 1-5). IEEE.

  • Talafha, B., Farhan, W., Altakrouri, A., & Al-Natsheh, H. (2019, August). Mawdoo3 ai at madar shared task: Arabic tweet dialect identification. In Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (pp. 239-243).

  • Talafha, B., Fadel, A., Al-Ayyoub, M., Jararweh, Y., Mohammad, A. S., & Juola, P. (2019, August). Team just at the madar shared task on arabic fine-grained dialect identification. In Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (pp. 285-289).

  • Ragab, A., Seelawi, H., Samir, M., Mattar, A., Al-Bataineh, H., Zaghloul, M., Mustafa, A., Talafha, B., Freihat, A.A. & Al-Natsheh, H. (2019, August). Mawdoo3 ai at madar shared task: Arabic fine-grained dialect identification with ensemble learning. In Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (pp. 244-248).

  • Al-Smadi, M., Talafha, B., Al-Ayyoub, M., & Jararweh, Y. (2019). Using long short-term memory deep neural networks for aspect-based sentiment analysis of Arabic reviews. International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics, 10(8), 2163-2175.

  • Al-Sadi, A., Talafha, B., Al-Ayyoub, M., Jararweh, Y., & Costen, F. (2019). JUST at ImageCLEF 2019 Visual Question Answering in the Medical Domain. In CLEF (Working Notes).

  • Talafha, B., & Al-Ayyoub, M. (2019, January). IoH-RCNN: Pursue the Ingredients of Happiness using Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks. In AffCon@ AAAI.

  • Talafha, B., & Al-Ayyoub, M. (2018). JUST at VQA-Med: A VGG-Seq2Seq Model. In CLEF (Working Notes).

  • Mohammad, A. S., Qwasmeh, O., Talafha, B., Al-Ayyoub, M., Jararweh, Y., & Benkhelifa, E. (2016, December). An enhanced framework for aspect-based sentiment analysis of Hotels’ reviews: Arabic reviews case study. In 2016 11th International conference for internet technology and secured transactions (ICITST) (pp. 98-103). IEEE.

  • Albadarneh, J., Talafha, B., Al-Ayyoub, M., Zaqaibeh, B., Al-Smadi, M., Jararweh, Y., & Benkhelifa, E. (2015, December). Using big data analytics for authorship authentication of arabic tweets. In 2015 IEEE/ACM 8th International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC) (pp. 448-452). IEEE.

  • Al-Smadi, M., Talafha, B., Qawasmeh, O., Alandoli, M. N., Hussien, W. A., & Guetl, C. (2015, October). A hybrid approach for Arabic named entity disambiguation. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Knowledge Technologies and Data-driven Business (pp. 1-4).

Patents: