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Staff Profiles

Dr Omnia Zayed

BSc., MSc., PhD

Contact Details

Post Doctoral Researcher
E: Omnia.Zayed@nuigalway.ie
Post Doctoral Researcher
Data Science Insitute
National University of Ireland Galway
IDA Business Park, Lower Dangan, Galway, Ireland
Twitter: @OmniaHZayed LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omnia-zayed-296b3726/
 
researcher
 

Biography

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Unit of Natural Language Processing (UNLP) at the Data Science Institute (DSI), National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG). I am also an Adjunct Lecturer at the same university. During my PhD, I studied metaphor processing in social media contexts and beyond with the aim of improving healthcare communication and language learning. Currently, I am focusing on social media analysis in the context of pandemic communication as part of the H2020 PANDEM-2 project.
My research interests include:
  • semantic analysis
  • information extraction
  • figurative language processing
  • social media analysis
  • healthcare communication analysis
  • Corpora creation

Prior to joining DSI, I joined various European Research Centres in Germany such as Sony Stuttgart Technology Center, IBM Boeblingen R&D Lab, and the UKP Lab at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. During this adventure, I worked on different projects related to information extraction, sentiment analysis in social media, big data preparation and QA summarization.

I hold a PhD in Science and Engineering from NUI Galway under the supervision of Paul Buitelaar and John McCrae. I also hold an MSc in Informatics with a minor in NLP from Nile University (2015), Egypt under the supervision of Samhaa El-Beltagy. My BSc is in Biomedical Engineering from Cairo University, Egypt (2010). I am passionate about the intersection of language, cognition and psychology.

You can check my publications on google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5Eu_ZSwAAAAJ&hl=en

Research Interests

natural language processing (NLP):
  • semantic analysis
  • information extraction
  • figurative language processing
  • social media analysis
  • healthcare communication analysis
  • Corpora creation

Research Projects

  Project Start Date End Date
Pandemic Preparedness and Response (PANDEM-2) 01-FEB-21
Patient-Centred Service Improvement (PaCSI) 01-JAN-19 31-JAN-20

Peer Reviewed Journals

  Year Publication
(2013) 'A Novel Approach for Detecting Arabic Persons' Names using Limited Resources'
Omnia H. Zayed and Samhaa R. El-Beltagy and Osama Haggag (2013) 'A Novel Approach for Detecting Arabic Persons' Names using Limited Resources'. Res. Comput. Sci, 70 :81-93 [Details]

Conference Publications

  Year Publication
(2020) Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Zayed, Omnia and McCrae, John P. and Buitelaar, Paul (2020) Contextual Modulation for Relation-Level Metaphor Identification Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020 Online, , pp.388-406 [Details]
(2020) Proceedings of The 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Zayed, Omnia and McCrae, John Philip and Buitelaar, Paul (2020) Figure Me Out: A Gold Standard Dataset for Metaphor Interpretation Proceedings of The 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference Marseille, France, , pp.5810-5819 [Details]
(2020) Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Figurative Language Processing
Zayed, Omnia and McCrae, John Philip and Buitelaar, Paul (2020) Adaptation of Word-Level Benchmark Datasets for Relation-Level Metaphor Identification Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Figurative Language Processing online, [Details]
(2019) The 2nd Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK 2019)
Omnia Zayed, John McCrae and Paul Buitelaar (2019) Crowd-sourcing A High-Quality Dataset for Metaphor Identification in Tweets The 2nd Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK 2019) Leipzig, Germany, , 20-MAY-19 - 23-MAY-19 [DOI] [Details]
(2018) Proceedings of the Workshop on Figurative Language Processing
Zayed, Omnia and McCrae, John Philip and Buitelaar, Paul (2018) Phrase-Level Metaphor Identification Using Distributed Representations of Word Meaning Proceedings of the Workshop on Figurative Language Processing New Orleans, Louisiana, , pp.81-90 [DOI] [Details]
(2016) Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Habernal, Ivan and Zayed, Omnia and Gurevych, Iryna (2016) C4Corpus: Multilingual Web-size Corpus with Free License Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16) Portoro\vz, Slovenia, , pp.914-922 [Details]
(2015) Natural Language Processing and Information Systems - 20th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2015 Passau, Germany, June 17-19, 2015 Proceedings
Omnia H. Zayed and Samhaa R. El-Beltagy (2015) A Hybrid Approach for Extracting Arabic Persons' Names and Resolving Their Ambiguity from Twitter . In: Chris Biemann and Siegfried Handschuh and Andr\'e Freitas and Farid Meziane and Elisabeth M\'etais eds. Natural Language Processing and Information Systems - 20th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2015 Passau, Germany, June 17-19, 2015 Proceedings , pp.355-368 [Details]
(2015) Proceedings of the International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing
Zayed, Omnia and El-Beltagy, Samhaa (2015) Named Entity Recognition of Persons' Names in Arabic Tweets Proceedings of the International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing Hissar, Bulgaria, , pp.731-738 [Details]
(2013) Natural Language Processing and Information Systems - 18th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2013, Salford, UK, June 19-21, 2013. Proceedings
Omnia H. Zayed and Samhaa R. El-Beltagy and Osama Haggag (2013) An Approach for Extracting and Disambiguating Arabic Persons' Names Using Clustered Dictionaries and Scored Patterns . In: Elisabeth M\'etais and Farid Meziane and Mohamad Saraee and Vijayan Sugumaran and Sunil Vadera eds. Natural Language Processing and Information Systems - 18th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, NLDB 2013, Salford, UK, June 19-21, 2013. Proceedings , pp.201-212 [Details]

Published Reports

  Year Publication
(2021) Metaphor Processing in Tweets.
Omnia Zayed (2021) Metaphor Processing in Tweets. National University of Ireland Galway, Galway, Ireland. [Details]

Employment

  Employer Position From / To
National University of Ireland Galway Postdoctoral Researcher 01-FEB-21 /
Technische Universität Darmstadt Intern 01-JUL-15 / 01-JUL-16
IBM Deutschland GmbH Intern 01-JAN-14 / 01-JUL-14
Sony Deutschland GmbH Intern 01-JUL-13 / 31-DEC-13
Nile University Research Assistant 01-MAR-11 / 01-JUL-13

Education

  Year Institution Qualification Subject
2021 National University of Ireland Galway PhD in Science and Engineering Informatics
2015 Nile University MSc in Communication and Informatics Science Informatics
2010 Cairo University BSc in Systems and Biomedical Engineering Biomedical Engineering

Languages

  Language
Arabic
English
German

Reviews

  Journal Role
57th Annual Meeting Of The Association For Computational Linguistics (Acl 2019) Reviewer
15th International World Wide Web Conference Reviewer

Teaching Interests

natural language processing, NLP programming with python.

Current Postgraduate Students (Taught)

  Name Degree Primary Supervisor
Conor Cuddihy Msc
Saikrishna Javvadi Msc

Recent Postgraduate Students

  Graduation Name Degree Primary Supervisor
2020 Oliver Moran Msc

Modules Taught

  Term/Year Module Title Module Code Subject / Desc
2021/2022 Introduction to NLP CT5120
2019/2020 Introduction to Natural Language Processing CT5120
2019/2020 Introduction to Natural Language Processing - Online CT5146
2018/2019 Introduction to Natural Language Processing CT5120
2017/2018 Natural Language Processing CT5101
2016/2017 Natural Language Processing CT5101