Omnia Zayed is a Postdoctoral Researcher and an Adjunct Lecturer at the Unit of Natural Language Processing (UNLP) at University of Galway, Ireland. Her research focuses on social media language analysis, semantic analysis, and information extraction.
Omnia has been deeply involved in the EU-funded interdisciplinary project, PANDEM-2, in which she focused on social media analysis in the context of pandemic preparedness and response. She led a team of 3 research assistants under the supervision of Prof Paul Buitelaar, one of the project’s PI and the head of the Unit of Natural Language Processing. Prior to that, she was involved in the Patient-Centred Service Improvement (PaCSI) project in partnership with the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA), to which she contributed by developing automated language analysis techniques to improve healthcare service delivery.
During her PhD, Omnia studied metaphor processing in social media contexts with the aim of improving healthcare communication and language learning. Recently, Omnia secured funding from the Irish Research Council for the Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship (IRC GOIPD). The proposed research focuses on redefining and broadening the scope of SMA by developing a holistic approach that integrates various challenging strands of public communication in a deep fashion.
Prior to joining the University of Galway she joined various research centres in Germany such as Sony Stuttgart Technology Center, IBM Boeblingen R&D Lab, and the UKP Lab at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. During this time, she worked on different projects related to information extraction, sentiment analysis in social media, big data preparation and QA summarization.
Omnia obtained her PhD in Science and Engineering from the University of Galway in June 2021. She holds an MSc in Information Technology from Nile University, Egypt (2015) and a BSc in Biomedical Engineering from Cairo University, Egypt (2010). She is passionate about the intersection of language, cognition and psychology.
Research Interests: Semantic analysis, figurative language processing, social media analysis, dataset creation, and information extraction.
Projects:
– EU-Funded H2020 PANDEM-2 Pandemic Preparedness and Response
– Patient-Centred Service Improvement (PaCSI) project
Grants:
– Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship 2023; GOIPD/2023/1556s. Glór: A Holistic Approach to Social Media Language Analysis
Publications: https://scholar.
