Rafiya Begum
About Rafiya Begum
Rafiya Begum is a Senior Computational Linguist with extensive experience in linguistics and speech technologies. She has worked at various esteemed institutions, including IIIT Hyderabad and Microsoft, and currently contributes to Uniphore in Hyderabad.
Current Role at Uniphore
Rafiya Begum serves as a Senior Computational Linguist at Uniphore, a position she has held since 2021. In this role, she focuses on advancing speech technologies, including Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Her expertise contributes to the development of innovative solutions in natural language processing, enhancing user interactions through improved linguistic capabilities.
Previous Experience in Computational Linguistics
Prior to her current position, Rafiya worked at ZEN3 as a Linguist from 2019 to 2020. She also held roles at Microsoft Development Centre India, where she completed internships in 2015 and 2016, and worked as a Software Localization Engineer from 2016 to 2017. Her decade-long tenure at IIIT Hyderabad as a Research Assistant from 2004 to 2014 provided her with a solid foundation in computational linguistics.
Educational Background in Linguistics
Rafiya Begum earned her Master's degree in Linguistics from Delhi University, studying from 2002 to 2004. She furthered her education at IIIT Hyderabad, where she obtained a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics. Her academic background has equipped her with the theoretical and practical knowledge necessary for her work in the field.
Research Contributions and Specializations
Rafiya has made significant contributions to the field of computational linguistics, particularly in the creation of syntactically annotated corpora, including the Hindi Treebank based on Dependency Grammar. She has developed guidelines for dependency annotation and has engaged in research on language resources for speech, focusing on areas such as code switching and text normalization. Her specializations include parsing, corpus linguistics, and morphological analysis.
Technical Skills and Expertise
Rafiya Begum possesses a diverse skill set in computational linguistics, specializing in speech-to-speech translation and machine translation. She has experience in POS tagging, chunking, and both syntactic and semantic analysis. Her work on creating verb frames for Hindi has contributed to advancements in natural language processing, showcasing her technical proficiency in the field.