1st PyData-Cairo Meetup: Understanding Word Embeddings and their Applications

Welcome to our First PyData-Cairo Meetup! It's our pleasure to invite you to a talk titled: "Understanding Word Embeddings and their Applications", hosted by Optomatica, A Machine Learning & Data Science Company, and "Human Foundation", a non-profit Egyptian organization.

Abstract:
Advancements in Neural Networks have led to developments in fields like computer vision, speech recognition and Natural Language Processing (NLP). One of the most influential recent developments in NLP is the use of word embeddings, where words are represented as vectors in continuous space, capturing many syntactic and semantic relations among them. The goal of this talk is to briefly describe what word embeddings are and how they are built.

The talk will also describe AraVec which is a set of Arabic Word Embedding Models for use in Arabic NLP. AraVec is a pre-trained distributed word representation (word embedding) open source project which aims to provide the Arabic NLP research community with free to use and powerful word embedding models. The first version of AraVec provides six different word embedding models built on top of three different Arabic content domains; Tweets, World Wide Web pages and Wikipedia Arabic articles. The total number of tokens used to build the models amounts to more than 3,300,000,000. The talk will conclude by presenting examples of applications that can make use of word embeddings.

Speaker's Bio:
Samhaa R. El-Beltagy is currently a full Professor at Nile University (NU) where she's the director of the Center for Informatics Science, head of the Text Mining Research Group and director of the Informatics, Computer Science and Big Data programs. She has also served as the acting Dean of the School of Communication and Information technology from Sept. 2016 to Sept. 2017. She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southampton, UK in 2001, and her Masters and Bachelor degrees in Computer Science from the American University in Cairo in 1997 and 1993 respectively. A paper based on her PhD work was awarded the SIGWEB Douglas Engelbart Best Paper Award given to the best paper at the annual ACM Hypertext conference in 2001. After completing her PhD, Dr. El-Beltagy has taken on technical leadership in numerous national developmental projects. Over the past 10 years, Dr. El-Beltagy's research has been primarily focused on the area of text analytics and she is currently a leading researcher in the area of Arabic Text Mining.

In the past three years she has given three keynote speeches about Social Media Analytics and their challenge in three different international conferences. She currently has over eighty refereed international publications and has served and continues to serve on the international program committees of numerous reputable international conferences and workshops, directly and indirectly related to the general field of “Data Analytics”. She has also served as an external reviewer for a number of international journals, and national projects.

Her research interests include: Text Mining, Social Media Analysis, Document auto-tagging, Ontology Population and Learning, Intelligent Search, Agent and Multi-agent based Systems and Frameworks, and Open and Adaptive Hypermedia

Schedule:
12:00 - 12:30 PM - Intro & refreshments
12:30 - 1:30 PM - Dr. Samhaa El-Beltagy Presentation
1:30 - 2:00 PM - Discussion and Closing

Location:
Building 3, The 6th Tourist District
6th of October, Egypt

Location Map:
http://goo.gl/maps/FeWHptQsgPL2

Note: RSVP is a must.

For any questions, please contact us through PyData-Cairo Meetup Messages.