Roy Bar-Haim

I am a Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) at IBM Research - Israel. I guide the research and application of Natural Language Inference (NLI) across the domains of natural language generation and summarization, and cloud security and compliance. I'm currently leading the technical work on Key Point Analysis, a novel technology for quantitative summarization of opinions. This technology is already being used by many teams in IBM. In addition, I am co-leading a project leveraging AI and language technologies for cloud compliance.

I was part of the team that developed Project Debater, The first AI system to debate humans experts (2013-2019). I led a research team in several IBM Research labs that developed some of core components in this project. Before joining IBM, I led NLP teams in several startup companies (2010-2013).

I hold a Ph.D in Computer Science from Bar-Ilan University (2010). I received my B.Sc (Summa Cum Laude) and M.Sc (Cum Laude) in Computer Science from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology (1996, 2005). In between, I served as a software development officer and a senior team lead at the Israel Defense Forces (1996-2002).

I presented a tutorial on Advances in Debating Technologies in AACL-IJCNLP 2020 (with Liat Ein-Dor, Yonatan Bilu and Noam Slonim),  ACL-IJCNLP 2021 and IJCAI 2021 (with Liat Ein-Dor, Matan Orbach, Elad Venezian and Noam Slonim). Slides can be found here.

Academic Activities

• Conference area chair: IJCAI 2023, ACL 2023 Industry Track, NAACL 2021, COLING 2016
• Conference reviewer/PC member: AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, COLING, CoNLL, ICWSM, LREC
• Workshop PC member: Argument Mining; Benchmarking: Past, Present and Future; Noisy User-generated Text
• Journal reviewer: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), Natural Language Engineering (NLE), Computer, Speech & Language, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (ACM-TIST), Knowledge-Based Systems
• Reviewer for the Israel Science Foundation