MA

Muhammad S. Abdo

PhD Candidate — Computational Linguistics & NLP Researcher

Department of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures (NELC) | Indiana University, Bloomington

About Me

I am a PhD candidate in Computational Linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington, working in the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures (NELC). My research focuses on natural language inference (NLI), mechanistic interpretability of multilingual language models, and Arabic NLP.

My dissertation investigates the internal reasoning mechanisms of multilingual transformer models for cross-lingual entailment, with a special focus on Arabic and its typological properties. I use circuit analysis, probing classifiers, and attention visualization to understand how models represent semantic relationships across languages.

Beyond technical NLP, I am also interested in language policy, minority language rights, and computational approaches to endangered language documentation.

Quick Info

  • Indiana University, Bloomington
  • NELC / Linguistics Dept.
  • PhD Candidate
  • Bloomington, IN, USA
  • Languages: English & Arabic
  • Email: Mabdo@iu.edu

Research Interests

Core Research Areas

  • Natural Language Inference (NLI)
  • Mechanistic Interpretability of Transformers
  • Multilingual & Cross-lingual NLP
  • Arabic Computational Linguistics
  • Machine Translation & Semantic Shifts
  • Language Policy & Minority Rights
  • Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs)
  • Speech Processing & Atypical Speech

Methods & Tools

  • Python, PyTorch, HuggingFace Transformers
  • Circuit Analysis & Attention Probing
  • Knowledge Graph Construction (Neo4j)
  • Synthetic Dataset Creation & Annotation
  • LLM Fine-tuning & Evaluation
  • Google AI Studio, Gemini, GPT-4o
  • Google Colab & Jupyter Notebooks
  • LaTeX, Overleaf (Academic Writing)

Research & Projects

Mechanistic Interpretability of Multilingual NLI Models

Dissertation research investigating how multilingual transformer models internally represent and process natural language entailment across languages, with special focus on Arabic cross-lingual phenomena. Employs circuit analysis, activation patching, and probing methods.

Dissertation In Progress Indiana University

Cross-lingual Entailment & Arabic NLP

Research on semantic inference across Arabic and English using multilingual transformer models. Includes construction of custom Arabic NLI datasets, cross-lingual annotation protocols, and evaluation of state-of-the-art multilingual models.

NLI Arabic NLP Dataset Construction

Knowledge Graph Construction from Academic Texts

Building structured knowledge graphs from academic corpora using Neo4j and Python-based NLP pipelines. Involves entity extraction, relation linking, and semantic querying for computational linguistics literature.

Knowledge Graphs Neo4j Digital Humanities

Authorship Verification & Stylometry

Research on authorship attribution and verification in Arabic and English texts using machine learning and stylometric approaches, with applications to historical manuscript analysis and forensic linguistics.

Authorship Analysis Arabic & English

Speech Data Augmentation for Atypical Speech (ALS/Dysarthria)

Developing data augmentation pipelines for speech analysis of individuals with ALS and dysarthria, supporting assistive technology research and atypical speech modeling.

Speech Processing ALS Assistive Tech

Datasets & Benchmarks

NLI datasets and benchmarks used and contributed to in my research:

MNLI ANLI FEVER-NLI WANLI LingNLI OCNLI Custom Arabic NLI Synthetic NLI Datasets

Teaching & Service

I have experience in graduate-level instruction and research mentoring in computational linguistics, NLP methods, and Arabic language studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. My teaching integrates hands-on coding with theoretical linguistic foundations.

I am actively engaged in academic service including conference reviewing (targeting ACL 2026, NESY 2026, and American Research Center in Egypt Annual Meeting), paper publication in NLI, multilingual NLP, and Arabic computational linguistics venues.

I also contribute to community outreach on language policy, minority language rights, and computational approaches to the documentation of endangered and under-resourced languages.

Contact

Email
Mabdo@iu.edu
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Institution
Indiana University
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Website
mabdo.org
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Research Focus

NLI & Interp.