Ali Nirheche

PhD Candidate — Department of Linguistics, UMass Amherst

I'm a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Linguistics Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, working at the intersection of computational linguistics and morphophonology. My research builds and compares computational models to explain how speakers generalize morphological patterns, with a particular focus on patterns of variation and exceptionality. I build large-scale corpora and computational learning algorithms to test these models against experimental data.

I primarily work on Arabic varieties, with a particular focus on Moroccan Arabic, a language that has emerged in a linguistically rich context shaped by contact with Berber, French, and Spanish.