Prof. Reut Tsarfaty
Natural language processing in Hebrew "(61)" Computational linguistics "(62)" Syntactic and semantic analysis Discourse and multi-discourse Morphologically rich languages analysis
CV
Prof. Tsarfaty is a full professor in the Department of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University and heads the ONLP Lab for Natural Language Processing. She is an international expert in the processing of morphologically rich languages, founded the SPMRL community for the analysis of such languages, and serves on the steering committee of Universal Dependencies — a global standard for automatic natural language parsing. She led the development of AlephBERT, a large open-source Hebrew language model. For four years she served as a visiting researcher at Google, where she contributed to the development of multilingual AI models. She recently won the Outstanding Paper Award at the ACL conference.
Research
Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational Hebrew, and Natural Language Programming
Many of the world's leading AI systems have been trained primarily on English. When applied to morphologically rich languages such as Hebrew — a language in which a single word can contain several units of meaning — their performance can drop significantly. Prof. Reut Tsarfaty develops Hebrew models and multilingual language models that enable computers to understand and process language across a diverse range of languages accurately, and, further along, to take instructions in natural human language and turn them into code.
Key Research Areas:
Hebrew Natural Language Processing (Hebrew NLP)
Morpho-syntactic analysis of complex languages
Multi-lingual Natural Language Processing
Multi-modal Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Programming
Discourse understanding and semantic-pragmatic analysis
Nature of the Research:
Theoretical-applied: developing models and resources for Hebrew and other languages, alongside basic research into human language understanding and the acquisition of human language by humans and machines.
Career Prospects:
Lab graduates go on to a variety of roles:
Industry: language processing, data science, chatbots, and question-answering systems. Lab alumni have joined companies such as Google, Apple, Salesforce, IBM, AllenAI, origin.ai, and others as research leads. Lab alumni have also become international entrepreneurs in natural language processing.
Public sector: development of Hebrew text-processing systems and language-based services
Academia: research in computational linguistics and natural language processing
Last Updated Date : 12/08/2026
