Science Student Spotlight: Abdul Rafae Khan

Abdul Rafae Khan is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Science program at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He completed his Master's degree in Computer Science from Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan in 2015. He is currently working under the supervision of Professor Jia Xu in Natural Language Processing (NLP), with a focus of Neural Machine Translation. His research topic is improving the machine translation quality on the informal text (commonly used in social media and text messages). Abdul Rafae recently advanced to Ph.D. candidacy.  He has one paper at Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and one conditionally accepted by a top journal in NLP, Journal of Natural Language Engineering.  Abdul Rafae is not only an outstanding researcher but also a team player. He was a key member of our CUNY team that won the first position in machine translation competition at WMT Biomedical English-French Translation Task in 2018. This year, he participated in the Semantic Evaluation (SemEval) Competition 2019 under the Cross-Lingual Semantic Parsing with UCCA Task, where he and the team received the 1st position in one track and the 2nd position in four tracks. The SemEval organizer awarded Abdul Rafae a student scholarship.