Meryem M'hamdi

Hi!

I'm Meryem M'hamdi, a Computer Science PhD graduate from the University of Southern California (USC), specializing in Natural Language Processing, multilingual learning, and large language models.

My research focuses on developing more adaptive and generalizable AI systems through meta-learning, continual learning, and cross-lingual transfer learning. My work has been published at ACL, NAACL, and SIGIR.

Beyond academia, I have worked with Adobe Research, Microsoft, and Meta, contributing to projects spanning semantic retrieval, recommendation systems, LLM evaluation, alignment, and human-centered AI.

I'm interested in bridging foundational AI research with real-world applications to build intelligent systems that are reliable, adaptable, and accessible across languages and cultures.

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News & Highlights

2026

October: Continuing my work on generative AI research at Meta, focusing on LLM post-training, alignment, and evaluation across coding, reasoning, and other complex domains.
July: Contributed to scalable LLM evaluation efforts at Meta, developing and validating 5,000+ rubric annotations across coding, STEM, finance, and medicine, helping make AI evaluation more systematic and reliable.
June: Honored to serve for the second consecutive year as an Organizing Committee Member for WiNLP (Widening NLP) ! It's a privilege to help foster a more inclusive, supportive, and diverse NLP research community, while creating opportunities for researchers to connect, share their work, and grow.
March: Thrilled to share that my EB-2 National Interest Waiver (NIW) petition has been approved! This is a meaningful milestone in my research journey and a recognition of the potential national importance of my contributions to artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning. Excited to continue advancing impactful AI research in the United States!
February: Excited to share that my second U.S. patent from my research at Adobe Research has been granted! Multilingual Semantic Search Utilizing Meta-Distillation Learning (US12547901B2) . This work combines meta-learning and knowledge distillation to advance multilingual semantic retrieval, particularly for low-resource languages. Grateful to my co-inventors and collaborators!

2025

October: Thrilled to announce that my U.S. patent from Adobe Research, Cross-Lingual Meta-Transfer Learning Adaptation to Natural Language Understanding (US12455911B2) , has been granted! This research explores data-efficient adaptation across languages using meta-transfer learning, advancing multilingual and low-resource NLP.
June: Developed an LLM-assisted workflow at Meta to organize 1,000+ coding tasks into a reusable taxonomy, achieving approximately 90% classification accuracy. This work supports more structured and scalable evaluation of advanced language models.
June: Excited to join the Organizing Committee of WiNLP (Widening NLP) ! Looking forward to supporting an inclusive research community and helping amplify diverse voices in natural language processing.

2024

December: Excited to start a new chapter as a Research Collaborator at Meta (via Rose International), working on generative AI research, LLM evaluation, and alignment!
March: Thrilled to join Microsoft AI as a Data Scientist II on the Bing Multimedia team! My work focuses on personalized image search, ranking quality, and LLM-based relevance evaluation.
January: Proud to have completed my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC)! My dissertation, Towards More Human-Like Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning, explores how human-inspired learning strategies can enable more adaptive, efficient, and multilingual AI systems.

2023

August: Will be TA-ing for CSCI 104: Data Structures and Object Oriented Design.
July: Presenting my poster at ACL'2023 main conference in Toronto, Canada.
May: Started my internship at Microsoft Bing Multimedia in Redmond.
March: Will be serving on the Program Committee of ACL 2023.
February: I passed my thesis proposal! Many thanks to my committee members: Prof. Jonathan May (chair), Prof. Aiichiro Nakano , Prof. Kallirroi Georgila , Prof. Xuezhe Ma , and Prof. Shri Narayanan for their support. I am officially a PhD candidate!

2022

October: I have accepted an offer to join Microsoft for a summer internship!
June: I will be attending NAACL 2022.
May: I have returned to Adobe Research to work as a research scientist intern.
April: I am the new organizer of NL Seminar at ISI. If you would like to participate as a speaker, feel free to reach out to me.
January: Happy New Year! I have started this year by submitting a paper for review to ARR 2022 targetting some ACL or EMNLP conference! I am also excited to peer-review for NAACL 2022!

2021

December: Our paper on X-METRA-ADA got approved for patent filing!
July: I have passed my Quals exam!
April: Will be serving on the Program Committee of EMNLP'21 and Meta-learning and Its Applications to Natural Language Processing Workshop at ACL'21 !
March: Excited to share that our paper with Adobe on "X-METRA-ADA: Cross-lingual Meta-Transfer learning Adaptation to Natural Language Understanding and Question Answering" got accepted to NAACL'21 .
February: Part of the organizing committee of Morocco.AI Webinar series! Join us for our first NLP webinar !

2020

August: Will be TA-ing for CSCI 662: Advanced NLP .
July: Giving a talk in ISI Graduate Student Symposium (GSS) .
April: Will be serving as a PC member for AACL-IJCNLP 2020 .
February: Will be joining Adobe Research in May for a summer internship in their San Jose HQ!

2019

November: Attending EMNLP 2019 in Hong Kong to present my work on Contextualized Cross-lingual Event Trigger Extraction with Minimal Resources at CONLL'19!
October: Participating in IARPA BETTER Kickoff Meeting!
September: Organizing the 2nd SoCal NLP Symposium in USC!
January: Joining USC/ISI NLP Group!

2018

November: Attending EMNLP 2018 in Brussels to present a poster in CONLL!
September: Graduated from EPFL with a Master in Computer Science!

Transfer Learning using Multilingual Embeddings

If a borderless world is an impossible fantasy, reducing borders between languages at least is not out of reach. With over 6,500 spoken languages around the globe, creating a unique customer service experience for everyone is a challenge faced by...

NLP Embeddings Multilingual Transfer Learning Event Detection Churn Detection Document Classification