معرفی
Wissam Antoun is a PhD Researcher at ALMAnaCH, a research team within INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique) in Paris. Specializing in Natural Language Processing with a focus on Arabic and French language models, he has developed several influential models including AraBERT (the first Arabic BERT), AraGPT2 (the first Arabic LLM), and CamemBERTa (a French language model based on DeBERTa V3). Prior to his current position, he served as a Research Engineer at ALMAnaCH, a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Siren Analytics in Beirut, and co-founded the Machine INtelligence Development (MIND) Lab at the American University of Beirut.
Wissam's research focuses on developing state-of-the-art NLP technologies for languages displaying high variability, particularly Arabic dialects used on social media. His work spans multilingual language modeling, tokenization techniques for morphologically rich languages, and the development of comprehensive language model suites. Recent projects include Gaperon (a French LLM suite with 1.5B, 8B, and 24B parameters), ModernCamemBERT (the first non-English ModernBERT model), and pioneering work on detecting French AI-generated text. His research demonstrates expertise in model training, evaluation, and practical implementation for real-world NLP applications.
His publication record shows consistent high-impact contributions, with AraBERT becoming the most cited Arabic AI paper and most starred Arabic GitHub repository, with over 10 million downloads on Hugging Face. His work has been published at major venues including Findings of ACL 2023 and preprints on arXiv. The trends in his recent articles show a progression from foundational Arabic language models to more sophisticated French language modeling and analysis of AI-generated content.
Wissam has received multiple prestigious awards including First Place in the Arabic Sentiment Analysis competition at KAUST (2021) and Second Place in the OSACT4 Shared task on Offensive Language Detection (2020). His technical capabilities span the full AI stack from research to deployment, with expertise in major frameworks, software tools, and programming languages.
As an educator, Wissam has served as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the American University of Beirut, teaching courses in Software Tools, Parallel Programming, and Data Structures and Algorithms. He has also provided NLP instruction through workshop series and supported contestants in the Stars of Science program. His lab work centers around the ALMAnaCH research team at INRIA, where he contributes to advancing French language modeling capabilities through active development on GitHub repositories.
