Bio
Nouran Khallaf is a PhD student at the University of Leeds. At the Center of Translation studies, funded by a scholarship from the Newton-Mosharafa Fund, British council. She researches Text Simplification methods using tools and theory from natural language processing and machine learning. Nouran. She is particularly interested in natural language processing, data mining, corpus linguistics, and software development. She is also broadly involved in several projects related to corpus collection and annotation, as well as technologies for language learning. Nouran holds an MS in computational linguistics from the University of Alexandria, and a BA in phonetics and linguistics from the same university.
Research interests
Her project is aimed at a robust Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool to simplify Arabic complex text. Text Simplification (TS) is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) task that aims to reduce the linguistic complexity of the text while maintaining its meaning and original information. The importance of TS involves: (i) designing and simplifying the language curriculum for both second and first language learners, by making texts easy to read for novice second language learners and assisting first language users with cognitive impairments and low literacy language levels; (ii) being a fundamental pre-process in NLP applications such as text retrieval, extraction, summarization, categorization, and translation. The system will also help teachers in inclusion schools as it simplifies the syllabus and aids them in the teaching process for both normal and disabled children without the need for trained teachers to deal with Autistic children. Also, it will help learners of Arabic and a foreign language since this tool will assist them to understand Arabic complex texts leading them to master the Arabic language.
Moreover, this tool would act also as a sub-assisted application to simplify the Arabic text before translating it. In addition, the PhD system would be widely used in schools to simplify the syllabus aiding both students and teachers and enhancing the learning process for normal and language-disabled students. This leads to the creation of a new generation of language-disabled people who are considered productive and influential persons in society and not a burden on it.