Rate My Professor Preslav Nakov

Preslav Nakov is Department Chair and Professor of Natural Language Processing at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). His 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. Prior to joining MBZUAI, he was a principal scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU. He previously served as a research fellow at the National University of Singapore from 2008 to 2011 and as a researcher at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in 2008. He has been an honorary lecturer at Sofia University, Bulgaria, since 2014.

Professor Nakov holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, supported by a Fulbright scholarship and UC Berkeley fellowship, and a Diploma (M.Sc. and B.Sc.) in Informatics from Sofia University (St Kliment Ohridski), Bulgaria. He authored the Morgan & Claypool book Semantic Relations Between Nominals (second edition, 2021) and two books on computer algorithms. He was the first recipient of the Bulgarian President's John Atanasoff award. He has received numerous honors including the ACM WebSci 2022 Best Paper Award, the Facebook Faculty Research Award in 2021, and the AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Award (Honorable Mention) in the NLP category. Professor Nakov has published more than 250 research papers in top-tier conferences and journals and is among the top 2% of the world’s most-cited researchers in the career achievement category according to Stanford University rankings. He served as program committee chair of ACL 2022 and holds leadership roles including president of ACL SIGLEX and secretary of SIGSLAV. His research has been featured in more than 100 news outlets worldwide.