About

Hello, I'm Dr. Mahmoud El-Haj, also known as Mo. I'm an NLP Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University. I'm also the Co-Director of the UCREL NLP Group and the Strategic Lead of the Arabic NLP and Financial NLP themese. I received my PhD in Computer Science from The University of Essex working on Arabic Multi-document Summarization. My work is mainly towards Summarization, Information Extraction, Financial NLP and multilingual NLP with my work being applied to many languages including English, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Welsh and many others. I have great interest in under-resourced languages and building NLP datasets.

Research Interests

Natural Language Processing (NLP), Language Resources, Data Science, Health and Medicine, Biomedical NLP, Text Summarization, Corpus and Computational Linguistics, Financial NLP and FinTech, Machine Learning on Text Classification, Crowd-sourcing and Information Extraction.

Current PhD Students

  • Nadhem Zmandar. PhD Title: Multilingual Financial Summarization
  • Chiamaka Chukwuneke. PhD Title: Named entity recognition for African Languages: a focus on Igbo
  • Jesse Phillips. PhD Title: The Automated Generation of Meaningful and Coherent Source Code Documentation Using Natural Language Processing Techniques

PhD Supervision

If you are interested in a PhD under my supervision please visit the link below which contains important information to help you with your application:
PhD Supervision Information (read before you email me)

I am interested in supervising PhD students on research topics related to:

  • Natural Language Processing (NLP)
  • Arabic and multilingual NLP
  • Financial NLP and FinTech
  • Biomedical NLP
  • Information Extraction and document structure detection
  • Automatic Text Summarization (Extractive, Abstractive)
  • Text Machine Learning, Classification and Clustering
  • Corpus and Computational Linguistics
  • Language and dialect identification

PhD External Examiner for:

  • Dr Fatimah Al-Qahtani (King's College London (KCL), England, UK)
  • Dr Taghreed Tarmom (University of Leeds, England, UK)
  • Dr Alaa Alqahtani (University of Birmingham, England, UK)
  • Dr Chatrine Qwaider (University of Gothenburg, Göteborg, Sweden)
  • Dr Mohammed Hamed Altamimi (Bangor University, Wales, UK)
  • Dr Maher Itani (Sheffield Hallam University, England, UK)

PhD Internal Examiner for:

  • Dr Matthew Coole (Lancaster University, England, UK)
  • Dr Edward Dearden (Lancaster University, England, UK)
  • Dr Lama Alsudias (Lancaster University, England, UK)
  • Dr Ronghui Mu (Lancaster University, England, UK) [Chair]

Education

Awards

Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) - Advance HE , UK, 2021.

Winning team for the best audience-facing tool - BBC NewsHack event , London, 2016.

Fully funded Internship at the National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan, 2011.

Best Paper Award at the 4th LTC Conference, Poznan, Poland, 2009.