This is the home of the bigIR research group at Qatar University (QU)!

The group (whose name stands for “Big Data and Informational Retrieval” research group) was founded (back in 2012) and led by Dr. Tamer Elsayed. The team has expanded since then to include PIs, postdocs, graduate students, research assistants, and undergraduate students. 

We conduct research at the intersection of Information Retrieval (IR), Big Data, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and applied Machine Learning (ML), with emphasis on Arabic language and social media analytics. For a quick overview, check our research work at our Google Scholar.

We aim at advancing the state-of-the-art on several fronts, especially Arabic IR, working on a number of internally- and externally-funded research projects by QU and Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF). 

Our network of collaborators span several local and international institutes, including Carnegie Mellon University-Qatar, University of Edinburgh, University of Maryland, RMIT University, University of Texas-Austin, Università di Bologna, AlJazeera Network, and Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI).