My main reseasrch interests focus on spoken language processing; particularly, spoken dialect identification, identifying charismatic speech, disfluency detection, automatic speech recognition, and
the prosodic and intonational structure of Arabic language.
Charismatic Speech:
Automatic analysis of a speakers' charisma can serve to diagnose or improve presentational skills as well as (potentially),
to identify new political leaders, or to improve speech synthesis when compelling speech is needed. We identify acoustic, prosodic, and lexical features that correlate with charisma and compare perceptions of charisma across cultures (American English, Palestinian Arabic and Swedish)
Biography Generation:
I've also been working on a multi-lingual and multi-media question answering system, part of DARPA Gale porject, particularly on automatically generating biographies. I use Information Extraction (IE) and text summarization techniques.
Previosuly, I explored the problem of Online Handwriting Recognition of Arabic script. I'm still interested in conducting more research in this problem, hopefully sometime after completing my PhD. See below a screenshot of the system I developed.
