I am a PhD student in Arabic Linguistics at Georgetown University. My research lies at the interface of linguistic theory and computational modeling, with a particular focus on Arabic morphosyntax and natural language processing.

A central question in my work is how grammatical generalizations can be made computationally explicit without flattening the structural richness and dialectal variation of Arabic. My current research focuses on:

• morphosyntactic agreement in Modern Standard Arabic and Arabic dialects;
• computational approaches to grammatical variation;
• causative–anticausative alternations and argument structure; and
• linguistically informed evaluation and resource development for Arabic NLP.

I combine formal linguistic analysis with corpus-based research, linguistic annotation, computational modeling, and the critical evaluation of language technologies.

Selected Publication

Bielasan Zaina, Salam Khalifa, and Nizar Habash.
“Beyond Gender, Number, and Rationality: Modeling Extended Arabic Morpho-Syntactic Agreement with Aggregation.”
ArabicNLP 2026.

You can reach me at btz3@georgetown.edu.