Aya Mourad
Email me

Aya Mourad

آية مراد

NLP Researcher in information extraction and low-resource languages, Paris

I build information extraction methods and datasets for low-resource languages like Arabic: nested entities, relations and events across long documents, with modest compute and little labelled data.

Email me Google Scholar
Aya Mourad
  • PhD researcher at Sorbonne Université, ISIR
  • Open to consulting in NLP
  • Fully funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship, SOUND.AI

Publications

  1. 3rd place, LM-KBC 2026Oral presentation

    The Instruction Tax on Factual Recall: Base Models Can Beat Their Instruction-Tuned Counterparts

    Khalil, C.* and Mourad, A.* (2026) · * equal contribution

    AKBC 2026, co-located with EMNLP 2026, pp. 518–526

    PaperPDFCodeView poster

    CertificateTalk
  2. ACL 2026 Main ConferenceFirst author

    AdabNER: Arabic Digital Archive Books with Nested Entity Recognition

    Mourad, A. and Jarrar, M. (2026)

    Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the ACL (Volume 1: Long Papers), pp. 33382–33396

    PaperPDFDatasetCodeView poster

  3. JournalFirst author

    Detecting Gender Bias in Arabic Text through Word Embeddings

    Mourad, A., Abu Salem, F. K., and Elbassuoni, S. (2025)

    PLoS One, 20(3), e0319301

    ArticleCode

  4. Pre-printBenchmark

    AraSTEM: A Native Arabic Multiple-Choice Question Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs Knowledge in STEM Subjects

    Mustapha, A., Al-Khansa, H., Al-Mubasher, H., Mourad, A., et al. (2024)

    arXiv:2501.00559

    Pre-printDataset

  5. Journal

    Capturing Children Food Exposure Using Wearable Cameras and Deep Learning

    Elbassuoni, S., Ghattas, H., El Ati, J., et al., including Mourad, A. (2023)

    PLOS Digital Health, 2(3), e0000211

    ArticleCode

  6. JournalFirst author

    A Large-Scale Analysis of COVID-19 Tweets in the Arab Region

    Mourad, A. and Elbassuoni, S. (2022)

    Social Network Analysis and Mining, 12(1), 71

    Article

Teaching

Large Language Models

Graduate course · Spring 2025 · 4 modules

EmbeddingsTokenizationPrompt engineeringAI ethics

Graduate teaching assistant

2018–2021

Advanced Machine LearningArtificial IntelligenceWeb Programming & DesignComputer NetworksIntroduction to Programming

Professional Diploma in AI & Data Science

Teaching assistant · 2022–2024

Machine LearningData ScienceDeep LearningIntroduction to Programming

Summer AI Academy 2024

Organiser · high-school students

AI fundamentalsMachine learning

All at the American University of Beirut.

Education and skills

Education

  • PhD in Computer Science, Sorbonne Université2024–2027, ISIR · Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow
  • M.Sc. Computer Science, American University of Beirut2019–2022, GPA 4.0
  • B.Sc. Computer Science, American University of Beirut2012–2016

Schools and awards

  • Deep Learning School 2025EFELIA Côte d’Azur, Sophia Antipolis, June–July 2025
  • Google Cloud Research CreditsCompute award for Vertex AI experiments
  • AUB Graduate Assistant FellowshipMerit-based, covering 100% of tuition

Skills

PythonPyTorchHugging Face TransformersPEFTvLLMLangChainTensorFlowOpenCVRAGDistributed trainingVertex AIGoogle CloudHPC / GPU clustersRC#SQLLaTeX

Languages

Arabic, nativeEnglish, full professional