Postdoctoral Researcher University of British Columbia

Abdellah EL MEKKI, Ph.D.

I work on natural language processing and inclusive large language models for linguistically and culturally diverse communities.

Portrait of Abdellah EL MEKKI

About

Research across languages, cultures, and modalities

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, and images), including low-resource and under-represented languages. I also work on research and applied science projects where machine learning intersects with other fields. My work has applied machine learning to network intrusion detection, biology (peptide sequencing), time-series modeling, anomaly detection, and a range of tabular-data problems. Across these domains, I have explored customized input-representation methods, from classical ML methods to adapted Transformer architectures. 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). Beyond my research, I have served as an Area Chair for ACL Rolling Review, as a reviewer for leading AI/ML venues and journals including NeurIPS, and as an organizer of workshops and shared tasks at top-tier AI conferences.

Currently Open to collaborations and consulting.

Research

Areas of interest

  • Multilingual and cross-lingual NLP
  • Multicultural 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

Recognition

Selected awards

Publications

Selected work

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Writing

Recent research notes

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