Carnegie Mellon University

A headshot of Mona Diab smiling and wearing a white and blue hijab

November 06, 2023

Diab Receives Prestigious Award for Development of Arabic Language Technologies

LTI director honored for her work enabling Arabic speakers to benefit from natural language processing and other language technologies

By Aaron Aupperlee

Bryan Burtner

Mona Diab, the director of the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, has received the King Salman Global Academy for the Arabic Language (KSAA) Award for her work enabling Arabic speakers to benefit from natural language processing (NLP) and other new language technologies.

The awards presented by the Saudi Arabian government are among the most prestigious for Arabic language research. They honor individual and institutional achievements and highlight work and initiatives serving, preserving and disseminating the Arabic language.

Diab received the award for computerizing the Arabic language and serving it with modern technologies. The academy noted her wealth of experience in NLP technologies and her preparation of new research standards in the field of computer science. It recognized Diab for developing specialized solutions and systems in Arabic spelling, morphology, grammar, semantics, lexicon, machine translation, automated dialogue systems and computational modeling of the language and its dialects. It also noted her scientific supervision of a large number of students and researchers. 

Information about the KSAA and its awards is available on the academy's website.