Mohamad Elzohbi


2025

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Tahdib: A Rhythm-Aware Phrase Insertion for Classical Arabic Poetry Composition
Mohamad Elzohbi | Richard Zhao
Proceedings of The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference

This paper presents a methodology for inserting phrases in Arabic poems to conform to a specific rhythm using ByT5, a byte-level multilingual transformer-based model. Our work discusses a rule-based grapheme-to-beat transformation tailored for extracting the rhythm from fully diacritized Arabic script. Our approach employs a conditional denoising objective to fine-tune ByT5, where the model reconstructs masked words to match a target rhythm. We adopt a curriculum learning strategy, pre-training on a general Arabic dataset before fine-tuning on poetic dataset, and explore cross-lingual transfer from English to Arabic. Experimental results demonstrate that our models achieve high rhythmic alignment while maintaining semantic coherence. The proposed model has the potential to be used in co-creative applications in the process of composing classical Arabic poems.

2024

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ContrastWSD: Enhancing Metaphor Detection with Word Sense Disambiguation Following the Metaphor Identification Procedure
Mohamad Elzohbi | Richard Zhao
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

This paper presents ContrastWSD, a RoBERTa-based metaphor detection model that integrates the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) and Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) to extract and contrast the contextual meaning with the basic meaning of a word to determine whether it is used metaphorically in a sentence. By utilizing the word senses derived from a WSD model, our model enhances the metaphor detection process and outperforms other methods that rely solely on contextual embeddings or integrate only the basic definitions and other external knowledge. We evaluate our approach on various benchmark datasets and compare it with strong baselines, indicating the effectiveness in advancing metaphor detection.