NYUAD and MBZUAI co-hosted the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) in Abu Dhabi from December 7-11. EMNLP is a top-tier NLP and AI conference organized by the ACL special interest group on linguistic data (SIGDAT). MBZUAI's Natural Language Processing Department is actively developing NLP datasets and methods to solve social problems. Why it matters: Hosting EMNLP in the UAE highlights the growing importance of NLP research in the region and the increasing contributions of local institutions like MBZUAI to the field.
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 received high honors at EMNLP 2025 for two research papers, placing them in the top 2% of accepted work. One paper, MAviS, is a multimodal AI system that identifies bird species by combining images, sounds, and text. The other award-winning paper focuses on uncertainty in LLM-as-a-Judge. Why it matters: The recognition highlights MBZUAI's growing influence in NLP and multimodal AI research, particularly in domain-specific applications like biodiversity conservation.
Thamar Solorio of MBZUAI served as general chair of EMNLP 2024, which hosted over 4,000 attendees. MBZUAI researchers presented nearly 50 studies, including one co-authored by Solorio and Monojit Choudhury that received an Outstanding Paper Award. Key themes included cultural awareness, machine-generated content detection, and LLM empathy and cultural representation. Why it matters: MBZUAI's strong presence at EMNLP highlights its growing influence in the international NLP research community and its focus on culturally aware AI.