I am a speech scientist, with a passion for analyzing and understanding human conversation.
I authored more than 40 papers for different speech and NLP challenges, with the main focus on speech overlaps, turn-takings, speech discourse, code-switching, along with the explainability of the speech modules. My work also includes studying the potential of language models for its linguistic task understanding capabilities.
I am currently working as a post-doctoral researcher at Qatar Computing Research Institute. I got my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Giuseppe Riccardi, from the University of Trento in 2017. I worked on analyzing different Turn-Taking behavior in the context of spontaneous and in-vivo human conversations while handling discourse of overlapping speech and the function of silence in the conversation.
I worked in many EU-funded projects to pursue the understanding of human-human/machine interaction.
I am currently involved in enriching the ArabicSpeech Portal (arabicspeech.org) with an aim to bridge the gap between the standard and dialectal resources and make Arabic speech technologies available for all.