Dr. Noorhan Abbas

Profile

Professional Overview

I am a Lecturer in Computer Science and Programme Lead for the MSc Artificial Intelligence (Online) at the University of Leeds, School of Computer Science. My research focuses on large language models, natural language processing, and AI applications in education, particularly AI-mediated feedback systems, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic AI.

I lead two postgraduate modules: OCOM5100M Programming for Data Science and OCOM5204M Data Mining and Text Analytics. My teaching integrates current AI methodologies with practical data science skills, with a strong emphasis on responsible and critical use of AI tools in research and professional contexts.

My research sits at the intersection of educational technology and AI. I have designed RAG-based educational chatbots that support postgraduate students in engaging with feedback on their coursework, and I am currently investigating how students develop AI feedback literacy in online learning environments. This work is funded by a LITE Fellowship Award (2026) and builds on an Alan Turing Institute Post-Doctoral Enrichment Award (2022, grant 2022PEA100083).

I am a member of the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics (LIDA) and the AI Research Group at Leeds. I contributed to the Edubots project (Erasmus+ Knowledge Alliance), organised the AI4EduRes workshop at the Alan Turing Institute in 2023, and co-delivered a tutorial on RAG-based educational chatbots at COLING 2025. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) and a Recognised Associate Research Supervisor (UK Council for Graduate Education).

I supervise MSc and doctoral students across NLP, LLMs, and data science, with students achieving peer-reviewed publications and a Best Student Paper Award at the BCS-SGAI Conference 2023.

Responsibilities

• Programme Lead - MSc Artificial Intelligence (online)

Research interests

• My research sits at the intersection of large language models, natural language processing, and educational technology. I focus on four interconnected areas:

  Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): I design and evaluate RAG-based systems that ground LLM outputs in domain-specific knowledge, reducing hallucination and improving reliability. A key application is educational chatbots that support postgraduate students in engaging with feedback on their coursework.

  AI in Education and Assessment: I investigate how AI tools can support feedback literacy, personalised learning, and formative assessment in online higher education. My current LITE-funded project examines how MSc students engage with AI-mediated feedback, with a focus on proactive recipience and feedback interpretation.

  Cross-Lingual NLP and Underrepresented Languages: I work on NLP tasks for low-resource and morphologically complex languages, including Arabic, Swahili, Nepali, and Swiss German dialect normalisation. This work addresses representation gaps in current LLM capabilities and evaluation benchmarks.

  Chatbot Technology for Collaborative Learning: Drawing on my work with the Edubots project (Erasmus+ Knowledge Alliance) and the AI4EduRes workshop (Alan Turing Institute, 2023), I explore how conversational agents can facilitate peer learning, student engagement, and institutional support in higher education settings.

Qualifications

• PhD in Technology and Policing (Lancaster University).
• MSc in AI and Text Analytics, University of Leeds.
• BSc in Computer Science and Business Administration. American University in Cairo.

Student education

Student feedback:

“I like the Monday live meeting. It brought more interactions with students and the teacher.  The teacher Noorhan is very responsible and always responsive. I am impressed by her energy and patience. I feel thankful!”

”In Data Science, you can lean heavily on Noorhan. She’s the heart and soul of the module. She makes the content very enjoyable and prepares you well for the assessments and projects even if you’re having difficulties.”

“I just wanted to thank you for the time and passion that you put into the teaching for the Data Science module, which I very much enjoyed. I particularly appreciated the added insights that you provided during the webinars on the wider issues.” 

“As I was trying to get foothold of the situation, the instructor lend her hand to keep me afloat. She was very encouraging and spend time to answer all my question. Dr. Noorhan had never said that the time was running out. Because of her knowledge and patience, the picture started to get clearer. By third week, I felt confident. At the end of the module, while doing the assessment 2, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I had learned. Now that I have submitted deliverables for the final assessment, I feel proud that I reached a milestone, a feeling of achievement.” 

Research MSc Students

• Jarrad Jinks – Intermediate Task Ensembline for Sarcasm Detection – Awarded Best Student Paper Award in the BCS-SGAI International Conference on AI 2023 
• Cameron Flanagan – Sentiment analysis of COVID 19 Vaccine Brands over the course of the pandemic
• Abhishek Gurumadhva – Creating A Teaching Assistant By Classifying Texts To Make Internet Recommendations
• Umar Jamil – BigLip: a pipeline for building data sets for lip-reading models
• Uttam Paul – Demand forecasting model to address liquor sales volatility during the Covid-19 pandemic 
• Waleed Kareem – Fighting Lies with Intelligence: Using Large Language Models and Chain of Thoughts technique to Combat Fake News
• Cassandra Mingjie Zhou – Evaluation of Legal Judgement Prediction Models and Their Fairness
• Dylan Turnley – Sense Memory

Current postgraduate researchers

• Rawan Bin Shiha