Roy Bar-Haim

I am a Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) at IBM Research - Israel, working on Natural Language Processing. My research interests include large-scale analysis of opinions, as well as real-world applications of natural language inference. I currently lead the research and development of Key Point Analysis, a novel technology for quantitative summarization of opinions.

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. More recently, I co-led the development of an AI-assisted system for cloud compliance (2021-2023). 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 (Outstanding Reviewer Award 2023), 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