About

Muhammad S. Abdo

AI researcher and PhD candidate at Indiana University Bloomington, studying mechanistic interpretability, multilingual reasoning, and knowledge-grounded language systems.

I am a dual-major PhD candidate in Computational Linguistics and Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures at Indiana University Bloomington, with a minor in Computer Science. My research connects linguistic theory with modern AI, from internal model representations to multilingual reasoning and structured knowledge systems.

I have built and evaluated datasets and systems for ellipsis detection, dialect classification, sexism detection, and named entity recognition in Arabic financial news. I have also studied public discourse on Arabic Twitter and analyzed language use in depression narratives. More recently, I have expanded my focus toward AI safety, explainability, and mechanistic interpretability — examining how transformer-based models internally represent linguistic features.

I developed Rasid, a 900M+ word Arabic Twitter corpus organized by year, month, and week — enabling longitudinal studies of Arabic language change. I also created RogueTeX, a web-based LaTeX editor with cloud compilation and storage, released publicly in early 2026.

quick_facts.sh
# Location
echo "Bloomington, Indiana, USA"

# PhD Major 1
echo "Computational Linguistics"

# PhD Major 2
echo "Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures"

# Minor
echo "Computer Science"

# Languages
echo "Arabic (Native)"
echo "English (Fluent)"
echo "Persian (Intermediate)"
Affiliations
🏛️ Dept. of Linguistics
Indiana University Bloomington
🏛️ Dept. of MELC
Indiana University Bloomington
🏛️ Hamilton Lugar School
Global & International Studies, IU

Academic Trajectory

Aug 2022 – Present
Dual-Major PhD — Computational Linguistics & Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures
Indiana University Bloomington · Minor in Computer Science
Research in mechanistic interpretability, multilingual NLI, knowledge-grounded AI, and low-resource language technology. Advisor: Dr. Sandra Kübler (Linguistics) and Dr. Nader Morkus (MELC). Passed qualifying exams (MELC, High Pass, 2026).
Jan 2021
MA in English Linguistics
Ain Shams University (Al-Alsun), Cairo, Egypt
Thesis: "Analyzing Appraisal in Major and Bipolar Depression Patients' Narratives in Mental Health Forums: A Corpus-Based Study." Advisor: Dr. Nihal Nagi Sarhan.
Aug 2018
PGCE — Postgraduate Certificate in Education
Monofiya University, Egypt
Jun 2013
BA in English Language and Literature
Benha University, Egypt

Research Interests

01

Mechanistic Interpretability

Probing transformer models to understand how speech and language systems encode linguistic features, nativeness, structure, and meaning.

TransformersAI SafetyProbing
02

Natural Language Inference

Modeling entailment, contradiction, and pragmatic inference across languages. Current work examines evaluation reliability and translation-induced label drift.

EntailmentPragmaticsDiscourse
03

Knowledge-Grounded AI

Building ontology-based knowledge graphs and retrieval pipelines that connect model outputs to structured evidence in biomedical and financial domains.

RAGKnowledge GraphsOntology
04

Multilingual & Low-Resource NLP

Creating datasets, models, and evaluation methods for languages and domains that remain underrepresented in modern AI.

DatasetsEvaluationLanguage Variation

Technical Expertise

NLP & ML
Transformers (HuggingFace) PyTorch scikit-learn LSTM RAG Few-Shot Prompting Fine-tuning
NLP Tasks
Dialect ID NER Ellipsis Recovery Text Classification Sentiment Analysis NLI Information Extraction
Programming
Python Pandas Unix / Bash Jupyter JavaScript LaTeX
Data & Annotation
Corpus Design Annotation Schemes CQL (Corpus Query Language) IAA Evaluation
Corpus Tools
LIWC Stylo ConceptNet ArTenTen Corpus Sketch Engine
Evaluation
F1 / MCC Human-in-the-Loop Bias & Fairness Annotation Quality