Dozens of studies by MBZUAI scientists presented at top natural language processing conference

One of the most important annual conferences in natural language processing (NLP) will kick off this week in Singapore and will feature dozens of new and exciting findings from faculty and students at MBZUAI.

The meeting, Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), attracts researchers from around the world to share the most advanced research in NLP.

Organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics, EMNLP provides a platform for both academia and industry professionals to meet, share insights, and discuss the practical applications of NLP in a variety of industries, including technology, healthcare, finance and education.

In total, 44 papers authored by MBZUAI affiliates will be shared at the conference, which will be held December 6 to 10 in Singapore.

Preslav Nakov, department chair of natural language processing and professor of natural language processing at MBZUAI, has eight papers at the conference on topics related to machine identification of disinformation, analysis of social media and detecting text generated with large language models. 

Iryna Gurevych, adjunct professor of natural language processing at MBZUAI, is an author on nine papers that will be presented at the meeting, covering topics ranging from dialogue generation, semantic analysis and multilingual language models.

MBZUAI Acting Provost Timothy Baldwin has five studies. These range from computational analysis of language used at the U.S. Supreme Court, to machine translation to the performance of large language models on exams designed for school children. Baldwin is also associate provost for academic affairs and professor of natural language processing at MBZUAI.

Assistant Professor of Natural Language Processing Alham Fikri Aji is sharing four papers related to large language models.

Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, visiting associate professor of natural language processing and machine learning at MBZUAI, is sharing research related to how large language models analyze and produce Arabic.

Along with the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computation Linguistics and the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), EMNLP is widely regarded as one of the most important gatherings of experts in the field of natural language processing.

Top ranked for computer science in the MENA region, MBZUAI currently ranks 19th globally in its areas of specialization – AI, computer vision (CV), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) – according to CSRankings. The updated rankings place MBZUAI alongside institutions such as MIT, the University of California, Berkeley, ETH Zurich, Nanjing University, and the University of Washington.