Mona Diab facts for kids

Mona Talat Diab is a smart computer scientist who works with computers and language. She is a professor and leads the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Before this, she was a professor at George Washington University and a research scientist at Facebook AI. Her work helps computers understand and use human language, especially in different languages like Arabic. She also uses machine learning, which teaches computers to learn from data.

Learning and School

Mona Diab studied a lot to become an expert in computer science. She earned her master's degree (M.Sc.) in computer science in 1997 from The George Washington University. Her main focus was on machine learning and artificial intelligence, which is about making computers think like humans.

Later, she got her Ph.D. in computational linguistics in 2003 from the University of Maryland. This field combines computer science with the study of language. After her Ph.D., she continued her research at Stanford University from 2003 to 2005. There, she was part of a group that worked on natural language processing.

Her Career Journey

After her time at Stanford, Mona Diab became a research scientist at Columbia University. She also taught computer science there. In 2013, she joined George Washington University as a professor, where she later became a full professor in 2017. She started and leads the GW NLP lab called CARE4Lang, which focuses on natural language processing.

Mona Diab has also helped lead important groups in the computer linguistics community. She was elected to leadership roles in groups like ACL SIGLEX and ACL SIGSemitic, which are big organizations for people who study language and computers.

In 2017, she worked at Amazon AWS AI, where she led a project called AWS Lex. This project helps businesses create computer systems that can have conversations with people. A few years later, she moved to Facebook AI as a research scientist. In 2023, she became the director of the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the first full-time director since the institute's founder, Jaime Carbonell, passed away.

What She Researches

Mona Diab's research is all about how computers can understand and use human language. This field is called natural language processing (NLP) or computational linguistics. Some of her main research areas include:

• Conversational AI: This is about making computers able to talk and understand conversations, like smart assistants.
• Understanding Words: She studies how computers can understand the meaning of words and phrases.
• Many Languages: She works on how computers can process and translate between different languages, especially Arabic.
• Social Media: She looks at how people use language on social media and what it tells us about how they interact.
• Finding Information: Her work helps computers find and pull out important information from large amounts of text.
• Machine Translation: This is about making computers translate text from one language to another.

She also has a special interest in Arabic language processing and working with languages that don't have a lot of computer data available.

Mona Diab helped start two new areas of research in computational linguistics. In 2007, she began exploring how computers can understand "code-switching," which is when people mix two languages in one conversation. In 2010, she helped start the study of "semantic textual similarity," which is about how computers can tell if two pieces of text mean the same thing.

She also co-founded CADIM in 2005, which is a key place for studying different Arabic dialects. In 2012, she helped create *SEM, an important conference for people who work on language meaning in computers.

Awards and Recognition

Mona Diab has received many awards and been recognized for her important work:

• In September 2019, she was chosen as one of the top 150 leaders in artificial intelligence (AI) in the whole country. She was invited to the White House AI Summit in Washington, D.C.
• In March 2017, Teen Vogue magazine featured her as one of "3 Muslim Women in STEM You Should Know About." STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.
• In May 2017, Elle magazine included her in an article called "Behind Every Strong Woman Is...Another Strong Woman," where women thanked others who supported them.
• She received two Google Faculty Research Awards. These awards helped her research projects, including building a large collection of Arabic words and analyzing feelings in Arabic social media text.
• She won the QNRF Best Poster Award in 2016 for a project called MANDIAC, which is a system for adding special marks to Arabic text.
• In 2015, she won a Best Paper Award for her research on how to tell the difference between "false friends" (words that look similar in two languages but have different meanings) using computer methods.