News
27-March-2024: Dr. Tamer and Fatima receive Outstanding Reviewer Awards at ECIR 2024
Dr. Tamer and Fatima receive "Outstanding Reviewer Awards" at ECIR2024. It's our pleasure to serve the IR community.
26-March-2024: A full paper accepted at SIGIR 2024!
A full paper has been accepted at SIGIR 2024, the TOP/most prestigious IR Conference. The paper is titled "Graded Relevance Scoring of Written Essays with Dense Retrieval". The paper is led by our own MSc student Salam Albatarni (in her first MSc year!) and co-authored by our group members Sohaila Eltanbouly and Dr. Tamer Elsayed.
20-Feb-2024: A full paper accepted at LREC-COLING 2024!
A full paper has been accepted at LREC-COLING 2024. The paper is titled "Can Large Language Models Automatically Score Proficiency of Written Essays?". The paper is led by our Alumni Watheq Mansour and co-authored with our group members Salam Albatarni, Sohaila Eltanbouly, and Dr. Tamer Elsayed.
20-Decemeber-2023: Fatima got her second PhD journal accepted at SNAM!
Fatima got her second PhD journal accepted at Social Network Analysis and Mining journal titled "Are authorities denying or supporting? Detecting stance of authorities towards rumors in Twitter".
29-November-2023: Our dear graduate, Dr. Reem is giving a talk
Our dear graduate, Dr. Reem is giving a talk today, Wednesday (10:30 AM Doha time), titled “Artificial Intelligence and its Relationship to Charitable and Humanitarian Work,” hosted by the Charitable Activities Regulatory Authority in Qatar.
24-November-2023: bigIR group is sponsoring the FIRST ArabicNLP Conference!
bigIR group is sponsoring the FIRST ArabicNLP Conference -- what an honor !
05-July-2023: Fatima is giving a talk at IEEE Women in Engineering in Canada
Fatima is giving a talk titled "Finding and Exploiting Authorities for Rumor Verification in Twitter" tomorrow Wed July 5th at 5:00pm Doha time.
13-June-2023: Dr. Tamer received "Dean's Award for Excellence in Research"!
The finest award we received from Qatar University!
Our lead Dr. Tamer Elsayed has just received the “Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research” from the College of Engineering at Qatar University!
The award recognizes his work and the work of every single member of our bigIR research group. It is indeed awarded for a great effort from the group over more than 10 years of research activities.
We are very proud of you Dr. Tamer and every member of our group -- Congratulations on the well deserved award!
03-June-2023: A new journal article that is made in bigIR
Watheq MSc journal paper titled "This is not new! Spotting previously-verified claims over Twitter" is published at IP&M journal (one of the top journals in the field)
22-May-2023: Reem, our 3rd PhD graduate, distinctly defended her PhD!
Our pride is indeed in our graduates 🎓😊
Congratulations Dr. Reem Suwaileh -- our 3rd PhD graduate 👏👏👏
Very pleased and proud that our member Reem Suwaileh has successfully passed her dissertation defense yesterday without modifications -- congratulations Dr. Reem! 👏👏👏
Your distinction made us all proud -- what a wonderful journey! Lots of challenges, but lots of fruitful outcomes!
Congratulations to the supervisors Dr. Tamer Elsayed and Dr. Muhammad Imran!
In a 5-year journey, Reem has achieved a strong research record with publications at COLING, ACL, ECIR, IP&M, and IJDRR. But more importantly, she gained invaluable experience working on a practical problem in a critical domain with few/rare data resources, especially in Arabic.
In parallel, she has also collaborated with her group mates in getting a Best Paper Award at WANLP 2022, served the community as PC member at prestigious conferences (e.g., SIGIR 2023), and co-organized CheckThat! Lab at CLEF 2018, 2019, and 2020.
Furthermore, Reem has led the top 500 distinguished graduates of QU this year! With that, we are confident she can now serve the research community as a solid independent researcher!
Thanks to the examination committee, Prof. Doina Caragea (KSU), Prof. Cagatay Catal (QU), Dr. Abdelkarim Erradi (QU), and Prof. Fayçal Bensaali (QU) for their support and valuable feedback.
Thanks to QNRF for supporting Reem's PhD with GSRA grant.
Wish you great success in your future steps!
Reem's message to the team:
I’ve always said: “bigIR is my real graduate school!” that made me do my PhD at
Qatar University!
I’m so grateful for every member: Dr. Tamer Elsayed, Dr. Rana Malhas, Dr. Maram Hasanain, [Dr. to be] Fatima Haouari, Dr. Mucahid Kutlu, Yassmine Barkallah, Watheq Mansour, Zien Sheikh Ali, and Salam Albatarni.
10-May-2023: Dr. Reem is *leading* the distinguished students honored in QU
What a pride!
Our own Reem Suwaileh (soon to be Dr. Reem) is *leading* the distinguished students honored in yesterday's QU graduation ceremony, taking the spot besides HH Sheikha Jawaher and QU President 👏👏
Congrats Reem for a distinct PhD journey!
We are so proud of you 👏👏
2-May-2023: A full paper accepted at the TOP NLP conference!
Our member Reem Suwaileh got a full paper accepted at ACL 2023, the TOP NLP conference!
Congratulations to Reem for another nice piece of her PhD! 👏👏👏
Congrats to supervisors Dr. Tamer Elsayed and Dr. Muhammad Imran too 👍
The paper is titled "IDRISI-RA: The *First Arabic* Location Mention Recognition Dataset of Disaster Tweets".
The English dataset is published at IP&M and released in the same GitHub repo here
25-Apr-2023: Postdoctoral Position in (Arabic) Natural Language Processing
Postdoctoral Position in (Arabic) Natural Language Processing
Qatar University (QU) is seeking applications for a postdoctoral researcher position for the development of a new automated Arabic essay scoring technology.
Find details here
23-Apr-2023: A new journal article that is made in bigIR
A new journal article that is accepted at Information Processing & Management journal 😊
Congrats to Fatima Haouari on her great PhD step 👏 👏👏
Congrats too to the teammates Dr. Tamer Elsayed and Watheq Mansour 👍
This is Fatima's first PhD journal article and is Watheq's first journal too😀.
Can't be more proud!
The paper is titled "Who Can Verify This? Finding Authorities for Rumor Verification in Twitter" and can be found here
2-Apr-2023: Fatima is bigIR's representative at ECIR 2023
Our own Fatima Haouari is our representative at ECIR 2023 👍
Fatima has two papers:
1. Detecting Stance of Authorities towards Rumors in Arabic Tweets: A Preliminary Study
1-Apr-2023: Tahaqqaq accepted at the TOP/most prestigious IR Conference
What a morning here in Doha!
#Alhamdulillah
Tahaqqaq, our real-time system for assisting Twitter users in Arabic claim verification, got accepted at SIGIR 2023, the TOP/most prestigious IR Conference, as a demo paper!!
Congratulations to the team who developed this system, namely: Zien Sheikh Ali, Watheq Mansour, Fatima Haouari, Dr. Maram Hasanain, Dr. Tamer Elsayed, and Dr. Abdulaziz AlAli.
25-Mar-2023: Reem got her a new journal article accepted
Our member Reem Suwaileh got her second 1st-author journal article accepted at Information Processing & Management journal, one of the top journals in the field!👏👏👏
The paper is titled "IDRISI-RE: A generalizable dataset with benchmarks for location mention recognition on disaster tweets"
"When a Disaster Happens, We Are Ready: Location Mention Recognition from Crisis Tweets" at the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.
The paper can be found here
15-Mar-2023: bigIR in AlJazeera’s “AI in Media” conference
Our team has represented Qatar University in Al-Jazeera’s “AI in Media” conference held today. We presented our “Tahaqqaq” application, which is an experimental real-time system that helps users verify spreading claims expressed in plain text or tweets or even Twitter search results. It provides multiple services, e.g., whether the tweet is check-worthy, veracity of the claim/tweet, credibility of the Twitter user, whether the claim was previously verified, and authority accounts relevant to the claim.
3-Jan-2023: New exciting shared task organized by our group
Authority Finding in Arabic Twitter is a new and exciting shared task organized by our members, Fatima Haouari and Dr. Tamer Elsayed, at CheckThat! Lab CLEF 2023.
For registration and more information, please visit this website.
27-Dec-2022: Rana distinctly defended her PhD!
On the same day! our 2nd-ever PhD graduate⭐️⭐️
Congratulations to Dr. Rana Malhas who distinctly defended her PhD dissertation with no modifications- Great job 👏👏
Supervisor: Dr. Tamer Elsayed
Examiners: Dr. Eric Atwell, Dr. Junaid Qadir, and Dr. Abdelaziz Bouras
27-Dec-2022: Zien defended her MSc thesis successfully!
⭐️A new MSc graduate⭐️
Our own Zien Sheikh Ali defended her MSc thesis with no modifications. Great job, Congratulations 👏👏
Supervisors: Dr. Abdulaziz Alali & Dr. Tamer Elsayed
Examiners: Dr. Paolo Rosso, Dr. Junaid Qadir, Dr. Uvais Qidwai
13-Dec-2022: Fatima got a paper accepted at ECIR 2023
Our members, Fatima Haouari and Dr. Tamer Elsayed, got a paper accepted at The 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2023).
The paper is titled "Detecting Stance of Authorities towards Rumors in Arabic Tweets: A Preliminary Study"
17-Nov-2022: bigIR is on Google Scholar
BigIR, our research group, has now a page on Google Scholar 🙂
The Google Scholar page can be found here.
30-Oct-2022: Fatima became Twitter Student Ambassador
What a pride!
Our own Fatima Haouari was selected as a Twitter Student Ambassador among very few from all over the world 👏👏👏
27-Jun-2022: Reem and Dr. Tamer are organizing a shared task for Location Mention Recognition (LMR)
Our members, Reem Suwaileh and Dr. Tamer Elsayed, are organizing a shared task for Location Mention Recognition (LMR) from crisis tweets at ITU GeoAI Challenge in collaboration with Qatar Computing Research Institute and the International Telecommunication Union.
The shared task website is available here.
20-Jun-2022: Zien presented her MSc at OSACT Workshop, LREC 2022
Our member, Zien Sheikh Ali, presented her nice MSc thesis work titled "Detecting Users Prone to Spread Fake News on Arabic Twitter" at OSACT workshop during LREC 2022.
20-Jun-2022: Dr. Tamer gave an overview of Qur'an QA 2022 Shared Task
Our lead, Dr. Tamer Elsayed, gave an overview of Qur'an QA 2022 shared task (Question Answering on the Holy Qur'an) at OSACT workshop during LREC 2022 and announced the winning teams!
Very proud of the organizing team, Rana Malhas, Watheq Mansour, and Dr. Tamer Elsayed, for holding such a great task!
More details about the shared task and winning teams can be found on the official website here. The paper is available here. Slides of the overview can be found here. The talk is also available on Youtube here.
19-Jun-2022: Reem gave a tutorial at The Artificial Intelligence for Collective Intelligence (AI4CI) workshop
Along with the Crisis Computing team at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), our member Reem Suwaileh gave a tutorial titled "Data Clinic on Geo-tagging Text Documents" at Artificial Intelligence for Collective Intelligence #AI4CI workshop organized by UNDP Accelerator Labs and QCRI.
6-Jun-2022: Reem got her first 1st-author journal article accepted
Our member Reem Suwaileh got her first 1st-author journal article accepted!👏👏👏
"When a Disaster Happens, We Are Ready: Location Mention Recognition from Crisis Tweets" at the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.
The paper can be found here.
25-May-2022: Watheq and Maram received the Distinguished Graduate Award
Our members Watheq Mansour and Maram Hasanain received the Distinguished Graduate Award in 2022 Qatar University Graduation Ceremony
22-May-2022: Maram defended her PhD successfully!
Our member Maram Hasanain has successfully defended her PhD dissertation titled “Enabling Effective Arabic Information Retrieval on the Web and Social Media” and got her degree *without modifications* to become the first-ever PhD gradate within our group!
14-Apr-2022: Fatima presented her Doctoral Consortium paper at ECIR2022!
Our member Fatima Haouari has just presented her Doctoral Consortium paper at ECIR2022.
Paper title: Evidence-based Early Rumor Verification In social Media.
12-Apr-2022: Watheq presented his full paper at ECIR2022!
Our member Watheq Mansour has just presented his full paper accepted at ECIR2022.
Paper title: Did I See it Before? Detecting Previously Checked Claims over Twitter.
15-Dec-2021: Fatima's Proposal Accepted at ECIR Doctoral Consortium!
Our group member Fatima's dissertation proposal has been accepted to be presented at ECIR 2022 doctoral consortium among few PhD students! Her proposal has very supportive reviews which indicated the importance and quality of her proposed research. This is a very nice achievement and a great starting step in her path in shaa’ ALLAH!
13-Dec-2021: Fatima is a PhD Candidate!
Our member Fatima Haouari has just passed her PhD candidacy exam and became a PhD Candidate! Examined by Dr. Arkaitz Zubiaga, Dr. Khaled Shaban, and Dr. Junais Qadir. Congratulations to Fatima and the supervisor Dr. Tamer Elsayed.
Dissertation Topic: Evidence-based Early Rumor Verification In Arabic social Media.
29-Nov-2021: Watheq defended his MSc thesis!
Our member Watheq Mansoor has just passed his thesis MSc defense **without modifications** -- one of few cases to happen at QU !!! Examined by Dr. Preslav nakov, Dr. Junaid Qadir and Dr. Abdulaziz Bouras.
Thesis Topic: Did I see it Before? Retrieving Previously-checked Claims Over Twitter.
19-Nov-2021: Watheq got a paper accepted at ECIR 2022!
A full paper by a our team member Watheq has been accepted at the The 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval
(ECIR 2022)!
The paper is titled "Did I See it Before? Retrieving Previously-checked Claims Over Twitter".
16-Dec-2020: Marwa's Proposal Accepted at ECIR Doctoral Consortium!
Our group member Marwa Essam's dissertation proposal has been accepted to be presented at ECIR 2021 doctoral consortium among few PhD students! Her proposal has straight accepted reviews which indicated the importance and quality of her proposed research. This is a very nice achievement and a great starting step in her path in shaa’ ALLAH!
24-Nov-2020: Marwa is a PhD Candidate!
Our member Marwa Essam has just passed her PhD candidacy exam and became a PhD Candidate! Examined by Dr. Jim Jansen, Dr. Khaled Shaban, and Dr. Abdulaziz AlAli. Congratulations to Marwa and the supervisor Dr. Tamer Elsayed.
Dissertation Topic: Background linking of News Articles.
30-September-2020: Reem got a paper accepted at COLING 2020!
A full paper by a our team member Reem has been accepted at the The 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2020)!
The paper is titled "Are We Ready for this Disaster? Towards Location Mention Recognition from Crisis Tweets".
Special congratulations to the paper's first author, Reem, for getting her first PhD paper accepted at such a prestigious venue.
16-July-2020: Marwa got a paper accepted at CIKM 2020!
A short paper by our group member Marwa has been accepted at CIKM 2020, one of the TOP Information Retrieval conferences!
The paper titles "Why is That a Background Article? A Qualitative Analysis of Relevance for News Background Linking" introduced the first (to our knowledge) qualitative analysis of relevance for news background linking problem. Through the proposed analysis, more effective news background linking systems can be developed.
BIG CONGRATULATIONS to Marwa and Dr. Tamer for their paper!
15-July-2020: bigIR got a paper accepted at ICWSM 2021!
A full paper by a research team including our group members, alumnus Dr. Mucahid and Dr. Tamer, has been accepted at the International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2021)! The paper is titled "Embeddings-Based Clustering for Target Specific Stances: The Case of a Polarized Turkey".
30-June-2020: bigIR got a paper accepted at ICTIR 2020!
A full paper by a research team including our group members, alumnus Dr. Mucahid and Dr. Tamer, has been accepted at the International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR 2020)! The paper is titled "Efficient Test Collection Construction via Active Learning".
17-June-2020: bigIR got a journal article accepted at JAIR!
A journal article by a research team including our group members, alumnus Dr. Mucahid and Dr. Tamer, has been accepted to be published at the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR)! The article is titled "The Value of Collecting Rationales for Item Ratings".
15-May-2020: Rana got a journal article accepted at TALLIP!
A journal article by our group member Rana has been accepted to be published at ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (TALLIP)!
The article "AyaTEC: Building a Reusable Verse-based Test Collection for Arabic Question Answering on the Holy Qur'an" introduced a test collection to evaluate Arabic QA over the Holy Qur'an catering to both believing and skeptical readers.
BIG CONGRATULATIONS to Rana and Dr. Tamer for their paper and invaluable resource!
23-Apr-2020: bigIR got two papers accepted at SIGIR 2020!
Two papers (one full and another short) by our group have been accepted at SIGIR 2020, the TOP and most prestigious Information Retrieval conference!
The Full paper "Finding the Best of Two Worlds: Faster and More Robust Top-k Document Retrieval" introduced new SOTA of query evaluation algorithms. It was a collaborative work with Omar Khattab (Stanford) and Mohammad Hammoud (CMU-Q).
The Short paper "ArTest: The First Test Collection for Arabic Web Search with Relevance Rationales" introduced the very first test collection with rationales of topic developers.
BIG CONGRATULATIONS to team members Maram, Reem, and Dr. Tamer for such an amazing achievement.
20-Apr-2020: Dr. Tamer gave a webinar introducing ArCOV-19!
Dr. Tamer Elsayed introduced our recently released dataset: ArCOV-19 to the research community in a webinar on Monday April 20th. The webinar included information on how the data was collected and some initial analysis on the collected tweets.
Slides of the webinar can be found here. The webinar is also available on Youtube here.
19-Apr-2020: ArCOV-19 dataset is featured in NLP Newsletter!
A new issue of the NLP Newsletter featured our recently released dataset: ArCOV-19. This issue from the NLP Newsletter covers topics ranging from some best practices regarding language models to improving reproducibility in machine learning to privacy and security in natural language processing (NLP). We hope ArCOV-19 will enable research for the community interested in Arabic language.
15-Apr-2020: Reem gave a Doctoral Consortium talk at ECIR 2020!
Our group member Reem Suwailah gave a nice talk about her PhD proposal at the ECIR 2020 Doctoral Consortium. Reem's dissertation topic is titled "Time-Critical Geo-location for Social Good". The talk detailed the research questions Reem is addressing in this topic as well as the methodology of her proposed work.
14-Apr-2020: bigIR releases ArCOV-19, the first Arabic Twitter Dataset on COVID-19!
18-Feb-2020: Fatima passed her PhD comprehensive exam!
Our group member Fatima Haouari has passed the first milestone in her PhD, the comprehensive exam. She passed the exam with a high score that make her eligible to go for the next milestones without sitting for an oral exam. The examination topics were Information Retrieval and Data Mining.
14-Jan-2020: Reem's Proposal Accepted at ECIR Doctoral Consortium!
Our group member Reem Suwaileh's dissertation proposal has been accepted to be presented at ECIR 2020 doctoral consortium among few PhD students! Her proposal has straight accepted reviews which indicated the importance and quality of her proposed research. This is a very nice achievement and a great starting step in her path in shaa’ ALLAH!
8-Dec-2019: Reem is a PhD Candidate!
Our member Reem Suwaileh has just passed her PhD candidacy exam and became a PhD Candidate! Examined by Dr. Ingmar Weber, Dr. Khaled Shaban, and Dr. Abdelkarim Erradi. Congratulations to Reem and the supervisors Dr. Tamer Elsayed and Dr. Muhammad Imran (QCRI).
Dissertation Topic: Time-Critical Geolocation for Social Good.
3-Dec-2019: Sara defended her MSc thesis!
Our member Sara Al-Rasbi has just passed her thesis MSc defense **without modifications** -- one of few cases to happen at QU !!! Examined by Prof. Omar Bossaid and Dr. Aiman Erbad.
Thesis Topic: SparkIR: A Scalable Distributed Information Retrieval Engine over Spark.
18-Nov-2019: Dr. Tamer gave a keynote talk at "Bias & Misinformation" workshop at SocInfo 2019.
Dr. Tamer Elsayed gave a keynote talk at "Bias & Misinformation" workshop at SocInfo 2019 that is held in Doha. The talk was titled "FakeDet: Research on Fake News Detection at Qatar University" and discussed research work and initiatives at Qatar University on that topic.
Abstract: Fake news becomes ubiquitous; therefore combating it becomes mandatory. In this talk, I will present research efforts and initiatives that we started recently at Qatar University to tackle the problem of fake news detection and fact checking, especially in Arabic. I will start with our work on re-ranking Web search results for better fact checking that studies how good current search engines are for finding pages that are useful in verifying given claims. I will then discuss our CheckThat! lab initiative that we co-organize at CLEF Conference for 3 years in a row. CheckThat! aims at supporting investigative journalists and volunteers for finding check-worthy claims and identifying evidence to verify those claims. Since verifying news might need “context”, I will also present very recent work on finding background articles that can help news-readers conceptualize the story of a given news article with more knowledge. Finally, I will briefly introduce and outline our new QNRF-supported project on fake news detection over Arabic social media in collaboration with University of Edinburgh and AlJazeera Network.
14-Nov-2019: Marwa & Fatima won Course Poster Competition on News Linking Research
Our members Marwa Essam and Fatima Haouari won the first place in the poster competition of the Applied Statistics Course organized by the College of Engineering at Qatar University. Their poster describes their collaborative work on the problem of news background linking. Congratulations to Marwa and Fatima!
13-Nov-2019: Marwa's Work Ranked 2nd at TREC News 2019!
The work of our member Marwa Essam, who participated for the first time in TREC 2019, has been ranked 2nd among 9 international research teams in the News Track! Congratulations Marwa for this big achievement!
Marwa addressed the problem of finding background articles that can help news readers conceptualize the story of a given news article with more knowledge. To tackle this problem, Marwa used graph-based analysis techniques to extract influential keywords from the given article that eventually form a search query to retrieve background articles. More on that in her TREC 2019 paper.
06-Nov-2019: "What it means to be a PhD Student" Workshop Concluded
Dr. Tamer Elsayed has given a new workshop titled "What it means to be a PhD Student" targeting current and prospective PhD students. More details here.
23-Mar-2023: Fatima has become a PC member of SIGIR
Our own Fatima Haouari has become a PC member in our TOP conf ACM SIGIR. What an achievement!😊