El-Haj Mo

Dr. Mo El-Haj is an Associate Professor (Reader) in NLP at the Data Science Program, College of Engineering and Computer Science, VinUniversity, and a Visiting Researcher at the School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University, UK. He is also the Director of NLP @ VinUniversity Research Group. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Essex in the United Kingdom and brings over 12 years of experience in Higher Education. He previously worked at Lancaster University, where he served as a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Computer Science, specialising in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Prior to that, he worked at the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex as a Data Mining Developer and NLP Researcher, contributing to projects focused on data analysis and text processing. An active researcher since 2006, Dr El-Haj has published over 90 peer-reviewed publications in top-tier venues, including EMNLP, COLING, LREC, ACL, IEEE Big Data, IJCL, and NLDB. His work is widely cited within the NLP communities, with more than 70 papers receiving over 10 citations each. Dr El-Haj’s research focuses heavily on low-resourced languages, including Welsh, Arabic, Igbo, Hindi, and other underrepresented languages. He has led projects developing and fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) and building linguistic resources to support these languages in tasks such as text summarisation, translation, and sentiment analysis. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) – Advance HE, UK. His achievements include being part of the winning team for the best audience-facing tool at the BBC NewsHack event in London, a fully funded internship at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, Japan, and receiving the Best Paper Award at the 4th LTC Conference in Poznan, Poland. In addition to his research contributions, Dr El-Haj has served as chair, editor, or reviewer for over 50 journals and conferences and is a member of the Editorial Board for the Natural Language Engineering (NLE) journal. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Natural Language Processing Book Series. Throughout his career, Dr El-Haj has secured over $1.2 million in research funding, leading impactful projects across healthcare, finance, and cultural preservation. He remains deeply committed to advancing NLP technologies to address societal challenges and fostering collaborations with colleagues and students.