Rate My Professor Nizar Habash

Nizar Habash is a Professor of Computer Science and Program Head of Computer Science at New York University Abu Dhabi, where he also serves as Global Network Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He holds a BS in Computer Engineering and a BA in Linguistics and Languages from Old Dominion University, an MS in Computer Science, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland College Park in 2003. Before joining NYU Abu Dhabi, Habash was a research scientist at Columbia University's Center for Computational Learning Systems. He directs the Computational Approaches to Modeling Language (CAMeL) Lab, established in September 2014, which conducts research in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, computational linguistics, and data science, with a focus on Arabic and its dialects including orthography, morphology, syntax, semantics, lexicons, corpora, machine translation, text analytics, and dialogue systems.

Habash has authored over 150 publications, including the book Introduction to Arabic Natural Language Processing (2010), and seminal papers such as 'Arabic tokenization, part-of-speech tagging and morphological disambiguation in one fell swoop' (2005, with Owen Rambow), 'Arabic preprocessing schemes for statistical machine translation' (2006, with Fatiha Sadat), and 'CATiB: The Columbia Arabic treebank' (2009, with Ryan M. Roth). Key lab projects under his leadership include MADAR (parallel dialectal corpus and lexicon for 25+ cities), Gumar (100-million-word Gulf Arabic dataset), Camelira (Arabic multi-dialect morphological disambiguator), SAMER (Simplification of Arabic Masterpieces for Extensive Reading), Maknuune (open Palestinian Arabic lexicon with over 36,000 entries), and the CAMeL Treebank (dependency treebank for Modern Standard and Classical Arabic). He has been principal investigator or co-investigator on over 20 grants and holds positions such as Honorary Professor at the University of Jordan. His impact is recognized through awards including the ELRA Antonio Zampolli Prize (2024), NYU Abu Dhabi Distinguished Service Award, and ACL Fellowship (2025).