His research spans artificial intelligence and computational linguistics, with a particular focus on Arabic data analytics, social media analysis, fake news, and hate speech detection. He has contributed to notable language technology projects, including the Penn Arabic TreeBank, PropBank, MADAR, and QALB.

He has held research roles at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, the University of Montreal, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pennsylvania. Zaghouani has secured over USD 6 million in competitive research grants from the Qatar National Research Fund, supporting projects such as MARSAD, hate speech detection, social cohesion, and author profiling.

He also consults for major big data firms such as Nuance and OpenText. He has co-organized international conferences and serves as an associate editor for journals including JNLE, TALLIP, Frontiers in AI, and Nature Communications. His 100+ publications have garnered 3,140+ citations with an h-index of 32.