Biography

Majdi Sawalha is an Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan (since 2012) and Al-Ain University, Abu Dhabi, UAE (since 2023).His research interests are in Computational Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Morphological and Syntactic Analysis, Semantic Analysis, Prosodic and Phonological Analysis, Text Data Mining, Lexicography and Machine Learning. As a graduate of the University of Leeds – U.K., he played an active role in building Leeds’ reputation for Arabic Language Computing.  He has developed the SALMA toolkit for morpho-syntactic analysis of Classical and Modern Standard Arabic. He is also developing state-of-the-art Arabic-IPA transcription technology. Currently, he is co-investigator for many research projects.

Education

• PhD in Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, 2012, The University of Leeds, Leeds, UK.
• Msc. in Computer and Information Systems, 2004, Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan
• Bsc. in Computer Science, 2001, Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan

Research Interests

Arabic Natural Language Processing

Artificial Intelligence for the Quran and Islamic Studies

Arabic Morphological and Synatactic Analysis

Arabic Corpus Linguistics

Arabic Computational Lexicography

Arabic WordNets

Selected Publications

 

Journal papers

 

[15]  Sawalha, Majdi; Mustafa-Awad, Zahra; Kirner-Ludwig, Monika (under review) “Converging and Diverging Images of Arab women in Western Media during the Arab Spring: A Corpus-based study”, submitted to Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power Journal.

 

[14] Mustafa-Awad, Zahra; Sawalha, Majdi; Kirner-Ludwig, Monika; Duaa Tabaza (2023) “Framing Gender in the Coverage of Protests: Arab Women’s Uprisings in English and German Press”, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law -Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique.

 

[13] Awwad, Hasna; Sawalha,Majdi; Allawzi, Areej; Yagi, Sane (2023) “Building English-Arabic Physics Glossary from Domain Corpus Based on ATE Approach” International Journal of Speech Technology. 26, 151–162, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10772-022-10001-0

 

[12] Mustafa-Awad, Zahra, Monika Kirner-Ludwig, and Majdi Sawalha (2021) “‘Arab Women’s Spring’ Revisited: Media Attitudes and Public Opinion in Germany.” Feminist Media Studies 21 (2): 189–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1690024  

 

[11] Sawalha, Majdi (2019) “The Design and Construction of the Traditional Arabic Lexicons Corpus (The TAL-Corpus)”, Modern Applied Science. Vol. 13, No. 2 (2019) DOI:10.5539/mas.v13n2p95  

 

[10] Brierley, Claire; Sawalha, Majdi; Islam, Tajul; Dickins, James; Atwell, Eric (2018) “Automatic Extraction of Quranic Lexis Representing Two Different Notions of Linguistic Salience: Keyness and Prosodic Prominence”, Journal of Semitic Studies, Volume 63, Issue 2, 1 October 2018, Pages 407–456, https://doi.org/10.1093/jss/fgy005

 

 [09] Sawalha, Majdi; Brierley; Claire, Atwell, Eric and Dickins, James (2017), “Text Analytics and Transcription Technology for Quranic Arabic”, International Journal on Islamic Applications in Computer Science And Technology; Vol 5, No 2.

 

[08] Hussein, Riyad; Sawalha, Majdi (2016) A Corpus-based Study of Similes in British and American English. Arab World English Journal, Volume 7, Issue 2, June 2016. Pp. 49-60 DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awej/vol7no2.4

 

[07] Brierley, Claire; Sawalha, Majdi; Heselwood, Barry; Atwell, Eric. (2016) A Verified Arabic-IPA Mapping for Arabic Transcription Technology, Informed by Quranic Recitation, Traditional Arabic Linguistics, and Modern Phonetics.  Journal of Semitic Studies, (Spring 2016) 61 (1): 157-186.  DOI: 10.1093/jss/fgv035. Oxford Journals.

 

[06] AlMaayah, Manal; Sawalha, Majdi; Abushariah, Mohammed (2016) Towards an automatic extraction of synonyms for Quranic Arabic WordNet. International Journal of Speech Technology,  Volume 19, Issue 2, pp 177–189, June 2016, DOI: 10.1007/s10772-015-9301-9

 

[05]  Abu Shawar, Bayan; Atwell, Eric; Sawalha, Majdi (2014) A Web-as-Corpus approach to populating Wikiversity for teaching information technology modules.  International Journal of Advances in Electronics Engineering – IJAEE Volume 4, issue 1, Pp. 28-32.

 

[04] Sawalha, Majdi; Atwell, Eric (2013). A standard tag set expounding traditional morphological features for Arabic language part-of-speech tagging, Word Structure 6 (1), 43-99, Edinburgh University Press.

 

[03] Sawalha, Majdi; Brierley, Claire; Atwell, Eric (2012). Prosody Prediction for Arabic via the Open-Source Boundary-Annotated Qur’an Corpus, Journal of Speech Sciences 2 (2), 175-191.

 

[02] Kanaan, Ghassan; Hammouri; Awni, Al-Shalabi, Riyad; Sawalha, Majdi (2009). A New Question Answering System for the Arabic Language. American Journal of Applied Sciences 6 (4): 797-805, 2009

 

[01] Kanaan, Ghassan., Al-Shalabi, Riyad; Sawalha, Majdi (2005). Improving Arabic Information Retrieval Systems Using Part of Speech Tagging. Information Technology Journal 4(1): 32-37. 2005

 

 

Book Chapters

 

[1] Majdi Sawalha, Abdullah Al-Shdaifat, Sane Yagi (2023), Topic Excavation in an Arabic Lexicographic Corpus, in Hayajneh, Hani (Eds) Cultural Heritage: At the Intersection of the Humanities and the Sciences, Reihe: Archäologie: Forschung und Wissenschaft. Bd. 7, ISBN 978-3-643-91252-7.

[2] Brierley, Claire; Sawalha, Majdi; El-Farahaty, Hanem (2020) Translating sacred sounds: encoding tajwīd rules in automatically-generated IPA transcriptions of Quranic Arabic.  Routledge Handbook of Arabic Translation. Hanna, Sameh F.; El-Farahaty, Hanem and Khalifa, A. W. London/New York, Routledge.

 

[3] Mustafa-Awad, Zahra; Kerner-Ludwig, Monika and Sawalha, Majdi (2020) Arab women in Western news discourse during the Arab Spring: Fading stereotypes and emerging images, in Garzone, Giuliana; Logaldo, Mara; Santuili, Francesca (Eds) Language of Conflicts: Polarisation/Popularisation of Discourse in the Periodical Press. Linguistic Insights – Studies in Language & Communication Series, Peter Lang International Academic Publisher.

 

 

 

Books

محمد زكي خضـر، محمد السعودي، مجدي صوالحة، سامي عبابنة، يوسف حمدان، مأمون حطاب (2019) "دليل أبحاث حوسبة اللغة العربية"، اللجنة الوطنية للنهوض باللغة العربية، مجمع اللغة العربية الأردني، الطبعة الأولى، عمّان – الأردن.

Conferences

Conference Proceedings

[32] Sawalha, Majdi; AlShdaifat, Abdallah; Alshargi, Faisal and Yagi, Sane (2022) “The Jordan Comprehensive and Contemporary Corpus of Arabic (JCCA): The Compilation and the Annotation Procedures”, In Computational Linguistics and the Arabic Language: Vision, Application, and Aspiration, Mohammed Bin Zaid University for Humanities, Abu-Dhabi, UAE, 25-26 Oct. 2022.

[31] Sawalha, Majdi; AlShdaifat, Abdallah; Yagi, Sane and A. Qudah, Mohammad. (2019). “Construction and Annotation of the Jordan Comprehensive Contemporary Arabic Corpus (JCCA).” In Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, 148–157. Florence, Italy: Association for Computational Linguistics. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W19-4616. August 1, 2019

[30] Abu Elberak, Ola; Alnemer, Loai; Sawalha, Majdi; Alsakran, Jamal. (2019) Predicting Cancer Survivability: A Comparative Study. In: Barolli L., Xhafa F., Khan Z., Odhabi H. (eds) Advances in Internet, Data and Web Technologies. EIDWT 2019. Lecture Notes on Data Engineering and Communications Technologies, vol 29. Springer, Cham

[29] Mustafa-Awad, Zahra; Kerner-Ludwig, Monika and Sawalha, Majdi (2017) “Arab women in news discourse during the Arab Spring: Broken stereotypes and emerging images”, Conflict in the Periodical Press: 6^th International Conference of the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit), IULM (International University of Languages and Media), Milan, Italy. 28-30 June 2017

 [28] Sawalha, Noor and Sawalha, Majdi (2017) “A study of Arabic Keyboard Layout”, in Proceedings of NTIT-2017: New Trends in Information Technology, The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan, 25 - 27 April 2017

[27] Yassen, Khetam; Sawalha, Majdi and Alzaghoul, Fawaz (2017) “Part-of-Speech Tagging for Classical and MSA Arabic Text Using NLTK”, in Proceedings of NTIT-2017: New Trends in Information Technology, The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan, 25 - 27 April 2017.

 [26] Mustafa-Awad, Zahra; Sawalha, Majdi; Kerner-Ludwig, Monika and Tabaza, Dua’a (2017) “Arab women in Western press: Designing news corpora for Arab women in British, American, and German news media during the Arab Spring” In: Proceedings of the 18^th International Conference on Computing and Computational Linguistics CICLing 2017, Budapest (Hungry), 17-23 April 2017.

[25] Mustafa-Awad, Zahra; Kerner-Ludwig, Monika; and Sawalha, Majdi (2016) “Arab Women in Western Print Press during the Arab Spring: Image and Perception in Germany” In: Proceedings of The International Conference Language, Literature and Culture in Education 2016 (LLCE2016), Venice (Italy), 12 – 14 July 2016

[24] Al-Solman, Ala’a; Sawalha, Majdi and Yagi, Sane (2015) “Punctuation Marks in Arabic: A Computational Linguistic Approach”. In: Proceedings ofWCIS 2015: Arabic Natural Language Processing: Systems, Models and Applications,2th – 13th October 2015, Tabuk, KSA.

[23] Sawalha, Majdi; Brierley, Claire; Atwell, Eric and Dickins, James (2014) “Text Analytics and Transcription Technology for Quranic Arabic”, In: Proceedings of IMAN 2014: 2nd International Conference on Islamic Applications in Computer Science and Technologies, 12th – 13th October 2014, Amman, Jordan

[22] Sawalha, Majdi; Al-Humssi, Laila; Momani, Raya; AlSaber, Sereen (2014). Automatic Qur’an Reciter. In: Proceedings of the 2^nd International Conference on Islamic Applications in Computer Science and Technologies (IMAN 2014), 12^th – 13^th October 2014, Amman, Jordan.

 

[21] Sawalha, Majdi; Brierley, Claire and Atwell, Eric (2014) "Automatically generated, phonemic Arabic-IPA pronunciation tiers for the Boundary Annotated Qur'an Dataset for Machine Learning (version 2.0)", in: Proceedings of LRE-Rel 2: 2nd Workshop on Language Resource and Evaluation for Religious Texts, LREC 2014 post-conference workshop 31st May 2014, Reykjavik, Iceland

[20] Brierley, Claire; Sawalha, Majdi; and Atwell, Eric (2014) Tools for Arabic Natural Language Processing: a case study in qalqalah prosody, in: Proceedings of LREC 2014 the 9th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 26-31 May, Reykjavik, Iceland

[19] AlMaayah, Manal; Sawalha, Majdi and Abushariah, Mohammad A. M. (2014). A Proposed Model for Quranic Arabic WordNet, in: Proceedings of LRE-Rel 2: 2nd Workshop on Language Resource and Evaluation for Religious Texts, LREC 2014 post-conference workshop 31st May 2014, Reykjavik, Iceland

[18] Sawalha, Majdi; Atwell, Eric (2013).Comparing morphological tag-sets for Arabic and English. Proceedings of the 7th International Corpus Linguistics Conference CL2013, 22-26 July 2013, Lancaster, UK.

[17] Sawalha, Majdi; Atwell, Eric; Abushariah, Mohammad A. M. (2013). Accelerating the processing of large corpora: using Grid Computing for lemmatizing the 176 million words Arabic Internet Corpus. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop of Arabic Corpus Linguistics WACL-2, 22 July 2013, Lancaster, UK.

[16] Abbas, Noorhan; AlDhubayi, Luluh; Al-Khalifa, Hend; Alqassem, Zainab; Atwell, Eric; Dukes, Kais; Sawalha, Majdi; Sharaf, Abdul-Baquee Mohammed (2013). Unifying linguistic annotations and ontologies for the Arabic Quran. In:  Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop of Arabic Corpus Linguistics WACL-2, 22 July 2013, Lancaster, UK.

[15] Abushariah, Mohammad A. M; Sawalha, Majdi; (2013). The effects of speakers' gender, age, and region on overall performance of Arabic automatic speech recognition systems using the phonetically rich and balanced Modern Standard Arabic speech corpus. Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop of Arabic Corpus Linguistics WACL-2, 22 July 2013, Lancaster, UK.

[14] Sawalha, Majdi; Atwell, Eric; Abushariah, Mohammad A. M. (2013). SALMA: Standard Arabic Language Morphological Analysis. In: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Communications, Signal Processing, and their Applications (ICCSPA’13). Sharjah, UAE.

[13] Sawalha, Majdi; Brierley, Claire; Atwell, Eric (2012). التحليل الآلي للوقف والابتداء في نصوص اللغة العربية الحديثة والكلاسيكية "Automatic Analysis of Phrase-Break Prediction for Arabic". In: Proceedings of the International Computing Conference in Arabic: ICCA 2012, Cairo, 26-28 Dec 2012, http://www.altec-center.org/ICCA/11-3-4/.

[12] Sawalha, Majdi; Brierley, Claire; Atwell, Eric (2012). Predicting Phrase Breaks in Classical and Modern Standard Arabic Text. in: Proceedings of the Language Resource and Evaluation Conference LREC 2012, 17-23 May 2012, Istanbul, Turkey.

[11] Brierley, Claire; Sawalha, Majdi; Atwell, Eric (2012). Open-Source Boundary-Annotated Corpus for Arabic Speech and Language Processing. in: Proceedings of the Language Resource and Evaluation Conference LREC 2012, 17-23 May 2012, Istanbul, Turkey.

[10] Sawalha, Majdi; Atwell, Eric (2011). التحليل الصَّرفي لنصوص اللغة العربية الحديثة والكلاسيكية "Morphological Analysis of Classical and Modern Standard Arabic Text". In: Proceedings of the 7^th International Computing Conference in Arabic (ICCA11). 31^st May - 2^nd June 2011, Imam Mohammed Ibn Saud University, Riyadh, KSA.

[09] Atwell, Eric; Brierley, Claire; Dukes, Kais; Sawalha, Majdi; Sharaf, Abdul-Baquee (2011) An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Arabic and Islamic Content on the Internet. in: Proceedings of NITS 3^rd National Information Technology Symposium.

[08] Sharaf, Abdul-Baquee; Atwell, Eric; Dukes Kais; Sawalha, Majdi; Al-Saif, Amal; Sharoff, Serge; Markert, Katja; Al-Sulaiti, Latifa; Abu Shawar, Bayan; Abbas, Nora; Roberts, Andy(2010). المشاريع الحاسوبية على اللغة العربية والقرآن بجامعة ليدز "Arabic and Quranic Computational Linguistics Projects at the University of Leeds". in: Proceedings of the workshop of Increasing Arabic Contents on the Web, organized by Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO), 16-19 October 2010, Damasus, Syria.

[07] Sawalha, Majdi; Atwell, Eric (2010). Fine-Grain Morphological Analyzer and Part-of-Speech Tagger for Arabic Text.  in: Proceedings of the Language Resource and Evaluation Conference LREC 2010, 17-23 May 2010, Valletta, Malta.

[06] Sawalha, Majdi; Atwell, Eric (2010). Constructing and Using Broad-Coverage Lexical Resource for Enhancing Morphological Analysis of Arabic. in: Proceedings of the Language Resource and Evaluation Conference LREC 2010, 17-23 May 2010, Valletta, Malta.

[05] Sawalha, Majdi; Atwell, Eric (2009). Linguistically Informed and Corpus Informed Morphological Analysis of Arabic. in: Proceedings of the 5th International Corpus Linguistics Conference CL2009, 20-23 July 2009, Liverpool, UK.

[04] Sawalha, Majdi; Atwell, Eric. (2009) توظيف قواعد النحو والصرف في بناء محلل صرفي للغة العربية  (Adapting Language Grammar Rules for Building Morphological Analyzer for Arabic Language). in: Proceedings of the workshop of morphological analyzer’s experts for Arabic language, organized by Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO), King Abdul-Aziz City of Technology ( KACT) and Arabic language Academy. Damascus, Syria.26-28 April 2009.

[03] Sawalha, Majdi; Atwell, Eric. (2008)Comparative evaluation of Arabic language morphological analysers and stemmers in: Proceedings of COLING 2008 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics. 18-22 August 2008, Manchester, UK.

[02] Kanaan, Ghassan; Al-Shalabi, Riyad; Sawalha, Majdi (2004), Improving Arabic Information Systems using Part of Speech Tagging, in: Proceedings of SJICM, The Sixth Jordanian International Congress of Mathematics, Organized by the Jordanian Mathematical Society in cooperation with Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan. 31^st August – 3^rd September 2004

[01] Kanaan, Ghassan; Al-Shalabi, Riyad; Sawalha, Majdi (2003), Full Automatic Arabic Text Tagging System, in: Proceedings of ICITNS, International Conference on Information Technology and Natural Sciences, Al-Zaytoonah University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan, October 19-21, 2003.

Teaching Courses

Postgraduate courses:

[1]  Computational Linguistics – PhD course – School of Foreign Languages

[2]  Computational Morphology – PhD course – School of Foreign Languages.

[3]  Corpus Linguistics – PhD course – School of Foreign Languages

[4] Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems – Master’s degree course – School of Information Technology.

[5]  Natural Language Processing – Master’s degree course – School of Information Technology.

[6] Arabic Natural Language Processing - Master’s degree course – School of Information Technology.

 

Undergraduate courses at the School of Information Technology:

[01] Artificial Intelligence – 3^rd-year undergraduate course.

[02] Natural Language Processing (NLP) – 3^rd-year undergraduate course.

[03] Special Topics on NLP and Machine Learning – 4^th-year undergraduate course.

[04] Formal Languages and Automata - 3rd-year undergraduate course.

[05] Computer Organization and Design -  3rd-year undergraduate course.

[06] Information Systems Innovation and new Technology – 3^rd-year undergraduate course.

[07] Certified Software (Programming Using Python 3) – 3^rd-year undergraduate course.

[08] Database Management Systems – 3^rd-year undergraduate course.

[09] Systems Analysis and Design - 3rd year undergraduate course.

[10] Documentation and Ethics – 2^nd-year undergraduate course.

[11] AI programming  – 1st-year undergraduate course.

[12] Introduction to Artificial Intelligence – 1st-year undergraduate course.

[13] Computer Skills for Humanities – 1^st-year undergraduate course.

[14] Remedial Computer Skills – 1^st-year undergraduate course.