Ibrahim Abu Farha

I am a researcher in Natural Language Processing (NLP), with a focus on Arabic language technologies, sentiment analysis, sarcasm detection, and the computational study of social media. My work aims to build language technologies that better reflect linguistic diversity, with a particular interest in underrepresented languages and user-generated content.

I have held research roles at the University of Sheffield and the University of Edinburgh, where I contributed to projects in NLP and social media analysis, focusing on both applied and foundational aspects of language technology.

I completed my PhD in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, where my research centered on Arabic sarcasm detection. My work was supervised by Walid Magdy and Bonnie Webber, and was part of the SMASH research group. During my PhD, I developed datasets and deep learning models for detecting sarcasm in Arabic social media, bridging computational methods and linguistic insight.

Prior to that, I earned an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh, where I focused on machine learning and NLP. My master’s dissertation investigated deep learning approaches to Arabic sentiment analysis.

I hold a BA in Computer Systems Engineering from Birzeit University in Palestine. My undergraduate thesis on automatic Arabic text summarization laid the foundation for my ongoing research in Arabic NLP.