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Alham Fikri Aji

Assistant Professor of Natural Language Processing

Research interests

Professor Aji explores efficient Natural Language Processing (NLP) through model compression and distillation, and NLP for under-resourced languages. This involves dataset curation/construction, data-efficient learning/adaptation, zero-shot approaches, or building multilingual language models. He is currently active in Indonesian and South-East Asian NLP researcher communities.

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Prior to joining MBZUAI, Professor Aji was an applied research scientist at Amazon. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation at the University of Edinburgh. During his postdoctoral and Ph.D., he contributed to efficient NMT-related projects, such as Marian: a fast NMT framework and browser-based translation without using the cloud.

Aside from efficient NLP, he is now interested in developing datasets and systems for multilingual NLP especially for under-resourced languages. Aji also co-initiated IndoNLP, a community-based movement to enable and advance NLP research for Indonesian languages.

Before getting into the world of AI and NLP, Professor Aji was active in competitive programming. He won a silver medal representing Indonesia in the 2010 International Olympiad of Informatics. He also worked in several well-known company's such as Apple (language engineer, 2015), Google (intern, 2017), and Amazon (applied scientist, 2021). He also worked at a start-up in Indonesia which is engaged in conversational AI.

Ph.D. in computational linguistics from University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Master’s in artificial intelligence from University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Bachelor of computer science from Universitas Indonesia, Indonesia

Outstanding Paper Award, EACL 2023
Best performing system, #SMM4H 2021 Shared Task
Outstanding contribution award, WNGT 2019
Indonesian Endowment Fund For Education Doctoral Scholarship awardee
World finalist, ACM-ICPC 2014
Silver medalist, International Olympiad of Informatics 2010

Aji’s fields of interest include deep learning, computational linguistic, machine translation, efficient and distributed machine learning, low-resource NLP, multilingual NLP, and data construction.

Alham Fikri Aji, Genta Indra Winata, Fajri Koto, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Ade Romadhony, Rahmad Mahendra, Kemal Kurniawan, David Moeljadi, Radityo Eko Prasojo, Timothy Baldwin, Jey Han Lau, Sebastian Ruder. "One Country, 700+ Languages: NLP Challenges for Underrepresented Languages and Dialects in Indonesia". ACL, 2022
Priyanka Sen, Alham Fikri Aji, Amir Saffari. "Mintaka: A Complex, Natural, and Multilingual Dataset for End-to-End Question Answering". COLING, 2022
Rahmad Mahendra, Alham Fikri Aji, Samuel Louvan, Fahrurrozi Rahman, Clara Vania. "IndoNLI: A Natural Language Inference Dataset for Indonesian". EMNLP, 2021
Alham Fikri Aji, Nikolay Bogoychev, Kenneth Heafield, Rico Sennrich. "In Neural Machine Translation, What Does Transfer Learning Transfer?". ACL, 2020
Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, Roman Grundkiewicz, Tomasz Grundkiewicz, Hieu Hoang, Kenneth Heafield, Tom Neckermann, Frank Seide, Ulrich Germann, Alham Fikri Aji, Nikolay Bogoychev, Andre Martins, Alexandra Birch. "Marian: Fast neural machine translation in C++". ACL, 2018
Alham Fikri Aji, Kenneth Heafield. "Sparse communication for distributed gradient descent". EMNLP, 2017

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Alham Fikri Aji

Assistant Professor of Natural Language Processing

Research interests

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