Portrait of Abdellah EL MEKKI

Abdellah EL MEKKI, Ph.D.

Natural Language Processing and Multilingual AI Researcher

Publications CV Contact

I’m a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of British Columbia (UBC), working on inclusive large language models adapted to specific languages and cultures across modalities (text, audio, images), including low‑resource and under‑represented languages. I have 10+ peer‑reviewed publications in venues such as ACL, EMNLP, and NAACL. I hold a PhD in Computer Science from Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (Morocco) and previously completed a postdoctoral year at MBZUAI (UAE).

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Availability: Open to collaborations and consulting.

Research Areas

  • Multilingual and cross-lingual NLP
  • Low-resource and under-represented languages
  • Large Language Models and instruction tuning
  • Sequence labeling (NER, POS), morphology, and syntax
  • Dialect identification and language variety modeling
  • Domain adaptation and transfer learning

Selected Publications

NileChat: Towards Linguistically Diverse and Culturally Aware LLMs for Local Communities

Abdellah El Mekki, Houdaifa Atou, Omer Nacar, Shady Shehata, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed · Accepted to EMNLP 2025 · Nov 2025
Paper Abstract

ProMap: Effective Bilingual Lexicon Induction via Language Model Prompting

Abdellah El Mekki, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, ElMoatez Billah Nagoudi, Ismail Berrada, Ahmed Khoumsi · Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics · Nov 2023 Outstanding Paper Award
Paper Abstract

Domain Adaptation for Arabic Cross-Domain and Cross-Dialect Sentiment Analysis from Contextualized Word Embedding

Abdellah El Mekki, Abdelkader El Mahdaouy, Ismail Berrada, Ahmed Khoumsi · Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies · Jun 2021
Paper Abstract

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Experience

  • Currently: Postdoctoral Researcher, University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada — Inclusive AI for under-represented languages and communities.
  • Previously: Postdoctoral Researcher, MBZUAI, UAE — Multilingual LLMs for diverse and morphologically rich languages.

What I Do

  • Make language technology effective for low-resource and diverse languages.
  • Develop inclusive AI applications (e.g., multilingual LLMs, assistants).
  • Build efficient systems that work under limited compute.

My Interests

  • Machine learning for understanding language.
  • Human–AI interaction with language technologies.
  • Inclusive, accessible, and culturally-aware language AI.