top of page
3d-rendering-warp-speed-hyper-loop-with-

Mubashara Akhtar

PhD student at King's College London -
 researching Natural Language Processing

About me

mubashara2 copy.jpg

mubashara.akhtar@kcl.ac.uk

  • 768px-Google_Scholar_logo.svg
  • GitHub
  • Twitter Social Icon
  • LinkedIn Social Icon

I am a PhD student at King's College London, supervised by Prof. Elena Simperl and Dr. Oana Cocarascu.

​

I previously interned at Google Deepmind in Zurich, working with Julian Eisenschlos. Prior to that I was doing a research visit with Andreas Vlachos at the Cambridge NLP Group. I am also part of the organisation committee of the FEVER workshop and co-leading the responsible AI committee of Croissant, a MLCommons project on ML dataset documentation.

​

My research is on knowledge-grounded NLP, focusing on reasoning over text, tables, and images as modalities for automated fact-checking and question-answering. I am also interested in related problems such as numerical reasoning with large language models (LLMs). 

​

Previously, I was a teaching & research assistant at TU Wien, as well as a software engineer and data scientist in industry. During this time I was working on machine learning projects for the biggest telecom provider in Europe. I obtained my undergraduate and master's degree in Computer Science (minor Economics) from the Technical University of Vienna (TU Wien).

​

Find my CV here. Please feel free to reach out if you’d like to chat or are interested in a collaboration.

News

Selected Publications

Exploring the Numerical Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models: A Comprehensive Analysis on Tabular Data.
Mubashara Akhtar*, Abhilash Shankarampeta*, Vivek Gupta, Arpit Patil, Oana Cocarascu, Elena Simperl.
Findings of Annual Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023.
 

Multimodal Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey.
Mubashara Akhtar, Zhijiang Guo, Michael Schlichtkrull, Oana Cocarascu, Elena Simperl, Andreas Vlachos.
Findings of Annual Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023.


Reading and Reasoning over Chart Images for Evidence-based Automated Fact-Checking.
Mubashara Akhtar, Oana Cocarascu, Elena Simperl.
Findings of Annual Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), 2023.


PubHealthTab: A Public Health Table-based Dataset for Evidence-based Fact Checking.
Mubashara Akhtar, Oana Cocarascu, Elena Simperl.
Findings of Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2022​

Honours & Awards

  • King’s College London NMES PhD research competition award for the category "Research Impact" (across the Faculty of Natural, Mathematical and Engineering sciences)

  • King’s College London NMES Faculty Studentship for 2020-2024 

  • European Forum Alpbach scholarship for the years 2020/21 

  • Selected for US Embassy Austria's Austria to Austin program, 2019

  • Ban Ki-moon Center mentoring partnership (mentored by Vice Rector of   TU Wien, Anna Steiger), 2019

  • Research scholarship from TU Wien for my master's thesis project, 2017

  • Summer school and conference grant from TU Wien for ACM RecSys, 2017

  • Merit-based scholarship from TU Wien, 2012-2016

  • Top 1% with 1.0 overall score at Austrian high school final exam (summa cum laude)

Honours & Awards

  • King’s College London NMES Research Impact Award for my PhD research on multimodal fact-checking (across the Faculty of Natural, Mathematical and Engineering sciences), 2023

  • King’s College London NMES Faculty studentship, 2020-2024 

  • European Forum Alpbach scholarship, 2020-2021 

  • Selected for US Embassy Austria's Austria to Austin program, 2019

  • Ban Ki-moon Center mentoring partnership (mentored by Vice Rector of   TU Wien, Anna Steiger), 2019

  • Research scholarship from TU Wien for my master's thesis project, 2017

  • Summer school and conference grant from TU Wien for ACM RecSys, 2017

  • Merit-based scholarship from TU Wien, 2012-2016

  • Top 1% with 1.0 overall score at Austrian high school final exam (summa cum laude)

Blog

bottom of page