I was extremely pleased and honored to deliver a lecture in Arabic this week (via Zoom) at Palestine Technical University – Kadoorie, as part of the Master’s program in Information Retrieval, at the kind invitation of Dr. Areej Jabir. I was truly overwhelmed by the warm welcome I received from the department, faculty, and university administration.
The lecture—which lasted over 3 hours!—was titled “LLMs for IR: Research by the bigIR Group at Qatar University“. It discussed three published research studies we conducted on this topic, focusing on three different tasks: measuring the relevance of student essays to the writing topic (Relevance in Automated Essay Scoring – SIGIR 2024), retrieving news to understand the context of a news story (News Background Linking – ECIR 2025), and answering questions from the Holy Quran (Qur’an QA – ArabicNLP 2025).
These research studies are the result of the work of the team members:
⭐ Salam Albatarni
⭐ Sohaila Eltanbouly
⭐ Marwa Essam
I pray that God teaches us what benefits us and that He makes what He teaches us beneficial.

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