AVAILABLE FOR PHD POSITIONS

Abdelbasset Djamai

AI Researcher & Engineer

Working at the intersection of NLP/LLMs, Agentic AI, and Computational Linguistics — with a focus on multilingual & low-resource settings, Arabic language technologies, knowledge-grounded language systems, and application in Digital Humanities & Computational Social Science. Seeking PhD opportunities.

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RESEARCH INTERESTS

Natural Language Processing

Large Language Models

Computational Linguistics

Multilingual & Low-Resource NLP

Computational Social Science

Digital Humanities

Social NLP

Generative AI

Agentic AI

Arabic NLP

Neural Machine Translation

Multimodal Learning

Vision & Language

AI & LLM/GenAI Security

Responsible & Trustworthy AI

Bias & Fairness

ABOUT

An AI researcher & engineer working primarily on NLP/LLMs, Agentic AI, Computational Linguistics, and Multimodal Learning.

My work spans multilingual and low-resource NLP, Arabic language technologies, knowledge-enriched language systems, and the application of AI to humanities and social-science research. I have contributed to model, resource, and benchmark development, published at *ACL venues, and built production agentic and multilingual systems across research and industry settings.

EXPERIENCE

AI Research Engineer (NLP/LLMs/GenAI)

Datategy

Paris, France (Remote) & Algiers, Algeria (Hybrid)

Sept 2025 – Present

•Designing and deploying multilingual NLP and agentic AI systems for industrial and enterprise use cases.
•Built a multilingual translation pipeline spanning 30+ language directions for complex XML/DITA technical documentation, with terminology-sensitive processing, RAG-augmented retrieval, and a multi-agent quality evaluation framework across seven assessment dimensions.
•Acted as technical lead for a multilingual agentic AI system for a major Algerian telecom operator, designing and evaluating a Text-to-SQL agent that supports French, Arabic, and English over relational data with automated visualization, structured output verification, cross-lingual grounding, and multilingual safety filtering.

NLP Researcher

NAMAA Community

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (Remote)

Mar 2025 – Present

•Advancing Arabic NLP through research on Arabic-centric and culturally aware (large) language models.
•NLP applications in computational social science and humanties contexts (polarization, hate speech, politiccal ideology/stance detection, ...), focusing on Arabic and multilingual settings.
•Engaaged in computational history projects using NLP & knowledge graph techniques to analyze low-resource, dialectal Arabic historical texts and oral testimonies.
•Investigated LLM-generated Arabic text detection using computational linguistic analysis for novel AI-authorship attribution techniques.
•Explored reinforcement learning for alignment in large multimodal and vision-language models adapted to Arabic content.

Research Assistant

University of Skikda

Skikda, Algeria

Jan – Dec 2025

•Co-led a project on LLM-based Classical/Historical Arabic-to-English machine translation informed by translation studies theory, addressing lexical nuance, cultural & linguistic translation gaps, and evaluation beyond surface fluency.
•Led a multimodal vision-language project for hate speech and toxicity detection in multilingual social media, with a focus on under-resourced Arabic dialects including Algerian Darja, investigating both zero-shot and multi-agent approaches.

Teaching Assistant

University of Skikda

Skikda, Algeria

Feb – Jun 2025

•Taught an interdisciplinary course on AI concepts for humanities research to English/Humanities students.
•Integrated NLP and generative AI with ethical perspectives to enhance student understanding of responsible AI development.

EDUCATION

Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence

University of Skikda

2022 – 2024

Valedictorian Award (Summa Cum Laude)

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

University of Skikda

2020 – 2022

Bachelor's 1st year, Mathematics & Computer Science

USTHB

2019 – 2020

PUBLICATIONS

AraModernBERT: Transtokenized Initialization and Long-Context Encoder Modeling for Arabic

Published

AbjadNLP 2026 · EACL

Paper

Omar Elshehy, Omer Nacar, Abdelbasset Djamai, Muhammed Ragab, Khloud Al Jallad, Mona A. Azim.

NAMAA at SemEval-2026 Task 9: Comparing Generative, Retrieval-Augmented, and Discriminative Methods for Online Arabic Polarization Detection and Type Classification

Accepted

SemEval-2026 · ACL

Paper

Abdelbasset Djamai, Sahara H. Al-Madi, Norah N. Al-Zaid, Khloud Al Jallad, Mona A. Azim.

Arabic Abstractive Text Summarization via Supervised Transfer and Deep Reinforcement Learning

Under Review

Information Processing and Management (Elsevier)

Paper

Abdelbasset Djamai, Fateh Bougamouza.

Bridging the Cultural Chasm: How Effective Are LLMs for Classical Arabic-to-English Machine Translation?

Poster

Algerian AI Symposium

Abdelbasset Djamai, Sarah Bendissa. Poster; presented.