Iryna Gurevych receives recognition for contributions to natural language processing

Only a few months into the year, Iryna Gurevych, adjunct professor of natural language processing at MBZUAI, has racked up several accolades for her contributions to artificial intelligence research.

Earlier this month, Gurevych was appointed as a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, one of the most significant honors that can be awarded to a scientist. The academy, or Leopoldina as it’s often called, has a long history, stretching back to 1652. Today, the organization, which is based in the German city of Halle, provides science-based advice to policymakers on “socially relevant issues,” according to the organization’s website. It also seeks to tackle important topics by providing interdisciplinary scientific insights, offering clear, actionable recommendations. The academy’s 1,700 members come from over 30 countries.

At the recent 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics that was held in Malta, Gurevych and co-authors were awarded the “Social Impact Award” for their study “Sensitivity, Performance, Robustness: Deconstructing the Effect of Sociodemographic Prompting.” The research explores the role of a technique called sociodemographic prompting, “which steers the output of prompt-based models towards answers that humans with specific sociodemographic profiles would give,” the researchers write. The paper is the largest comprehensive study of sociodemographic prompting to date.

The other authors of the study are doctoral student Tilman Beck and postdoctoral researcher Hendrik Schuff of Technical University of Darmstadt and Associate Professor of Data Science Anne Lauscher of the University of Hamburg.

Gurevych was also named one of the 15 most important women in the field of artificial intelligence in Germany by Manager Magazin, a German monthly business publication. The magazine noted Gurevych’s collaboration with Amazon through her home institution of Technical University Darmstadt, through which she is building an AI assistant that answers scientific questions. Others on the list include scientists at top universities, startup founders and leaders at large tech corporations.

In addition to her appointment at MBZUAI, Gurevych is professor of computer science and founder/director of the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. In addition to these recent recognitions, her outstanding work has received numerous awards, including a fellow award in 2020 from the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). She was also appointed president of the ACL in 2023. Gurevych received the ever-first Hessian LOEWE Distinguished Chair award in 2021 and is co-director of the NLP program within ELLIS, a European network of excellence in machine learning.