She is the founder and Director of the GW NLP lab (CARE4Lang). Before joining GW, she was a Research Scientist (Principal Investigator) at the Center for Computational Learning Systems (CCLS), Columbia University in New York. She is also co-founder of the CADIM group with Nizar Habash and Owen Rambow, which is one of the leading places and reference points on computational processing of Arabic and its dialects. Her research interests span several areas in computational linguistics/natural language processing: computational lexical semantics, multilingual processing, social media processing, information extraction & text analytics, machine translation, and computational socio-pragmatics. She has a special interest in low resource language processing with a focus on Arabic dialects.