A study by MBZUAI's Preslav Nakov and Cornell co-authors examines how to develop systems that detect fake news in a landscape where text is generated by humans and machines. The research, presented at the 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, analyzes fake news detectors' ability to identify human- and machine-written content. The study highlights biases in current detectors, which tend to classify machine-written news as fake and human-written news as true. Why it matters: Addressing these biases is crucial as machine-generated content becomes more prevalent in both real and fake news, requiring more nuanced detection methods.
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.
MBZUAI is now ranked 24th globally in AI, computer vision, machine learning, and natural language processing, according to CSRankings. This ranking is attributed to the addition of faculty like Preslav Nakov, Hanan Al Darmaki, and Samuel Horvath. MBZUAI now ranks ahead of universities like the University of Michigan and Imperial College London in specific AI fields. Why it matters: This ranking establishes MBZUAI as the top CS institution in the Arab World and highlights the UAE's growing prominence in AI research.
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.
A new paper from MBZUAI researchers explores using ChatGPT to combat the spread of fake news. The researchers, including Preslav Nakov and Liangming Pan, demonstrate that ChatGPT can be used to fact-check published information. Their paper, "Fact-Checking Complex Claims with Program-Guided Reasoning," was accepted at ACL 2023. Why it matters: This research highlights the potential of large language models to address the growing challenge of misinformation, with implications for maintaining information integrity in the digital age.
Muhammad Arslan Manzoor became MBZUAI's first NLP Ph.D. graduate, focusing his research on media bias under Professor Preslav Nakov. His thesis, 'MGM,' explored using audience overlap graphs to predict the factuality and bias of news media, an approach that differs from traditional textual analysis. Manzoor's work aims to improve the efficiency of media profiling in real-time by leveraging relationships captured in media graphs. Why it matters: This research offers innovative methods for identifying bias in news, which is crucial for promoting informed social discourse and combating disinformation in the region.
MBZUAI Professor Preslav Nakov discusses Meta's shift to crowdsourced fact-checking via Community Notes, replacing third-party fact-checkers. Community Notes, originating from Twitter's Birdwatch, allows users to add context to potentially misleading posts, visible after community consensus. Research indicates this approach can reduce misinformation and lead to post retractions. Why it matters: The adoption of crowdsourcing for content moderation by major platforms like Meta could significantly impact online information quality for billions of users.
MBZUAI alumnus Zain Muhammed Mujahid is pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Copenhagen, focusing on factual text generation in LLMs to combat misinformation. During his master's at MBZUAI, he researched political bias and misinformation in media outlets using LLMs, under the mentorship of Professor Preslav Nakov. His master's thesis involved assessing a media outlet's factual reporting level and political leaning on topics like immigration and economy. Why it matters: This research addresses a critical challenge in AI, enhancing the reliability of LLMs and mitigating the spread of disinformation, an issue of global concern.