MBZUAI researchers had 26 papers accepted at ACL 2023, a top NLP conference. Assistant Professor Alham Fikri Aji co-authored eight papers, including one on crosslingual generalization through multitask finetuning (MTF). Deputy Department Chair Preslav Nakov co-authored a paper on a Bulgarian language understanding benchmark dedicated to the memory of Yale Computer Scientist Dragomir R. Radev. Why it matters: MBZUAI's strong presence at ACL highlights its growing influence in the NLP field and its contributions to multilingual AI research.
MBZUAI had 22 papers accepted at ICLR 2023, with faculty Kun Zhang co-authoring seven of them. Yuanzhi Li, an affiliated assistant professor at MBZUAI, received an honorable mention for his paper on knowledge distillation. Additionally, a paper co-authored by MBZUAI President Eric Xing was recognized as a top 5% paper at the conference. Why it matters: MBZUAI's strong presence at a top-tier machine learning conference like ICLR demonstrates the university's growing influence and research capabilities in the global AI landscape.
MBZUAI faculty and students will present 44 papers at the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) conference in Singapore. Research topics include disinformation detection, social media analysis, dialogue generation, and Arabic LLMs. Preslav Nakov, Iryna Gurevych, Timothy Baldwin, Alham Fikri Aji, and Muhammad Abdul-Mageed are among the MBZUAI researchers presenting at the conference. Why it matters: MBZUAI's strong presence at a top NLP conference highlights the UAE's growing contributions to cutting-edge AI research and its increasing global prominence in the field.
The 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2025) is being held in Abu Dhabi from January 18-24, hosted by MBZUAI. The conference features paper presentations, demonstrations, keynote speeches, workshops, and tutorials, with over 1,500 attendees. MBZUAI faculty and students contributed 22 papers to the conference, including research on fact-checking and cross-cultural content. Why it matters: Hosting COLING 2025 highlights the UAE's growing role as a hub for AI and NLP research, particularly in Arabic language processing.
MBZUAI researchers presented two studies at NAACL 2025 concerning how LLMs understand cultural differences, with one study winning the SAC award. One study, titled "Reading between the lines: Can LLMs identify cross-cultural communication gaps," assesses GPT-4o's ability to identify cultural references in Goodreads book reviews. The researchers created a benchmark dataset using annotations from 50 evaluators across different cultures to measure the LLM's ability to identify culture-specific items (CSIs). Why it matters: Improving LLMs' cross-cultural understanding is crucial for ensuring these models can be used effectively and equitably across diverse global contexts.