Preslav Nakov
Department Chair of Natural Language Processing, and Professor of Natural Language Processing
Research interests
Professor Nakov’s research interests include computational linguistics and natural language processing, disinformation, propaganda, fake news and media bias detection, fact checking, machine translation, question answering, sentiment analysis, lexical semantics, and biomedical text processing. Email
Prior to joining MBZUAI, Professor Nakov worked at the Qatar Computing Research, HBKU where he was a principal scientist. Previously, he was a research fellow at the National University of Singapore (2008–2011) and a researcher at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (2008). He has been an honorary lecturer at Sofia University, Bulgaria since 2014.
Professor Nakov authored a Morgan and Claypool book titled Semantic Relations Between Nominals (2nd edition in 2021) and two books on computer algorithms. He was also the first to receive the Bulgarian President's John Atanasoff award, named after the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer.
Professor Nakov is one of the leading experts on “fake news”, disinformation, fact checking, propaganda, and media bias detection and has published tens of research papers on solutions and stop-gaps for the ever-growing online social media infodemic.
He’s served on the program committees of the major conferences in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. Most recently, he was a program committee chair of the annual conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2022).
Professor Nakov is president of ACL SIGLEX, the Special Interest Group (SIG) on the Lexicon of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). He is also secretary of SIGSLAV, the ACL SIG on Slavic Natural Language Processing. He also serves on the advisory board of the European Chapter of ACL, and he is a secretary of the Truth and Trust Online TTO) board of trustees. He is an Action Editor for the Computational Linguistics (CL) journal and for the Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL) journal, an Associate Editor for Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (TASLP) journal, for the IEEE Trans. on Affective Computing journal (TAFFC), for the Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence journal (sections: 1. Language and Computation; 2. Natural Language Processing), and for the AI Communications (AIC) journal, a Member of the Editorial Board of Computer Speech and Language (CSL) and of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering (NLE), and an Editorial Board member of the Language Science Press Book Series on Phraseology and Multiword Expressions.
His research has been featured in more than 100 news outlets, including MIT Technology Review, Communications of the ACM (Research Highlights), Forbes, Boston Globe, Science Daily, Popular Science, Fast Company, The Register, WIRED, and Engadget.
- Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley, USA (Fulbright scholarship and UC Berkeley fellowship)
- Diploma (M.Sc. and B.Sc.) in informatics from Sofia University (St Kliment Ohridski), Bulgaria
- ACM WebSci 2022 Best Paper Award
- Facebook Faculty Research Award (2021)
- AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Award (Honorable Mention) in the NLP category
- CIKM 2020 Best Long Research Paper Award
- ACL 2020 Best Demo Paper Award (honorable mention)
- Member, Board of the International Machine Learning Society, 2015
- SemEval’2020 Best Task Paper Award (honorable mention)
- Qatar Artificial Intelligence National Competition: Level 2 – “Proof of Concept and Demos” (2020, winner)
- TM Forum and IBC 2019 Media-Telecom Catalyst project on “AI Indexing for Regulatory Practice” with Al Jazeera, Associated Press, RTE Ireland, Tech Mahindra, V-Nova, and Metaliquid (inaugural project award)
- SocInfo 2019 Best Poster Award
- RANLP 2011 Young Researcher Award
- Bulgarian President's John Atanasoff award, 2003
- Fulbright scholarship — 10 months, Ph.D. at UC Berkeley (2002/2003)
- University of California at Berkeley Graduate fellowship (2002/2003)
- Sofia University Rector’s award for Best student for the academic year 1997/1998
- Honorary National Diploma for achievements in Computer Science and Philosophy by the Bulgarian Ministry of Education, Science and Technologies, 1996 (there were 54 such national-level honorary diplomas in sciences and arts)
Nakov has published more than 250 research papers in top-tier conferences and journals, and he was named among the top 2% of the world’s most-cited researchers in the career achievement category, part of a global list by Stanford University.
- The Spread of Propaganda by Coordinated Communities on Social Media. Kristina Hristakieva, Stefano Cresci, Giovanni Da San Martino, Mauro Conti, Preslav Nakov. WebSci 2022, pp. 191-201 (best paper award at ACM WebSci'2022)
- Detecting Propaganda Techniques in Memes. Dimitar Dimitrov, Bishr Bin Ali, Shaden Shaar, Firoj Alam, Fabrizio Silvestri, Hamed Firooz, Preslav Nakov, Giovanni Da San Martino - ACL-IJCNLP’2021
- A Neighbourhood Framework for Resource-Lean Content Flagging. Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, Dimitrina Zlatkova, Momchil Hardalov, Yoan Dinkov, Isabelle Augenstein, Preslav Nakov. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 10:484-502 – TACL journal
- RuleBert: Teaching Soft Rules to Pre-trained Language Models. Mohammed Saeed, Naser Ahmadi, Preslav Nakov, Paolo Papotti. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp.1460-1476 – EMNLP’2021
- We Can Explain Your Research in Layman's Terms: Towards Automating Science Journalism at Scale. Rumen Dangovski, Michelle Shen, Dawson Byrd, Li Jing, Desislava Tsvetkova, Preslav Nakov, Marin Soljacic. 35(14), 12728-12737 – AAAI’2021
- Semantic Relations Between Nominals. Vivi Nastase, Stan Szpakowicz, Preslav Nakov, Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha. Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies, Morgan & Claypool Publishers 2021, pp. 1-234 – book
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