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Biography
Professor of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, Kuwait University — and adviser to Kuwaiti government on information technology for a quarter of a century.
Salah Alnajem read for his MA and PhD in Computational Linguistics at the University of Essex, completing the masters with distinction in 1996 on chart parsing using feature structures, and the doctorate in 1998 on computational approaches to Arabic morphology. He has taught at Kuwait University since, becoming full Professor in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature in 2006.
His work sits at the point where classical Arabic linguistics meets computation. The research treats problems that are old in the Arabic grammatical tradition — i'lāl, verbal derivation, orthographic variation, the nominal sentence — with the formal machinery of finite-state morphology, inheritance hierarchies and constraint-based grammar. The aim throughout has been systems that work on the Arabic people actually write, rather than on an idealised standard.
Alongside the academic post he has advised Kuwaiti government bodies on information technology continuously since 2000, and in 2013 founded Information Age Consulting to build the systems that research makes possible.
Education
Academic appointments
Public-sector advisory roles
Earlier
Before the academic career, Alnajem worked as a computer graphics and animation designer at the Noura National Centre from 1991 to 1994 — a background that shows in a lasting concern for how technical results are presented and understood.
The full record
The complete curriculum vitae, including committee service, conference participation, courses taught and thesis supervision, is available as a PDF.
Curriculum vitaeFull academic and professional record · PDF, Arabic, 13 pages, July 2024Get in touch
Research enquiries, supervision, and speaking.
For academic collaboration, thesis supervision, conference participation or media enquiries — or for consulting work, through Information Age Consulting.