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Mubashara Akhtar

mubashara.akhtar@kcl.ac.uk

I recently completed my PhD at King's College London, under the supervision of Prof. Elena Simperl and Dr. Oana Cocarascu. I am also a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge, collaborating with Prof. Andreas Vlachos.

I interned at Google Deepmind in Zurich, where I worked with Julian Eisenschlos. Prior to that, I conducted a research visit with Prof. Andreas Vlachos at the University of Cambridge. I am also part of the organisation committee of the FEVER workshop and co-lead the Responsible AI committee of Croissant, an MLCommons project.

My research interests include NLP, multimodal reasoning, and data-centric ML. During the past years my research focused on knowledge-grounded NLP, developing benchmarks and large language models (LLMs) for reasoning over multimodal data such as text, tables, and images.

Previously, I worked as a teaching and research assistant at TU Wien and as a software engineer and data scientist in industry, contributing to ML projects for Europe's largest telecom provider. I hold both undergraduate and master's degrees in Computer Science, with a minor in Economics, from TU Wien.

Find my CV here. Please feel free to reach out if you’d like to chat.

News

Dec 2024: I defended my thesis 🎉 & our paper TANQ: An open domain dataset of table answered questions was accepted at TACL.
Sept 2024: Our paper on Croissant was accepted as a 🌟 spotlight paper at NeurIPS 2024 (top ~3% of submissions).
Aug 2024: Just submitted my PhD thesis! I'll be attending ACL 2024 in Bangkok to present ChartCheck.
June 2024: Our paper introducing the Croissant format for ML dataset documentation won the Best Short Paper Award at DEEM. 🎉
May 2024: Our paper on explainable fact-checking against chart images accepted at ACL (Findings).
Feb 2024: Croissant has been released! Check out the related publication, MLCommons announcement, and Google blog post.
Dec 2023: I am presenting two papers at EMNLP 2023 in Singapore.
Oct 2023: First-author papers on multimodal fact-checking and numerical reasoning with LLMs accepted at EMNLP 2023.
July 2023: I started an internship at Google Deepmind. I'll be in Zurich until November.
May 2023: Received a Research Impact Award at King's for my research on multimodal fact-checking.
May 2023: Attending EACL in Dubrovnik to present our paper on Chart Fact Verification and organising FEVER.
Jan 2023: Began a research visit at the University of Cambridge , working with Prof. Andreas Vlachos.
Jan 2023: Our paper Reading and Reasoning over Chart Images for Evidence-based Automated Fact-Checking was accepted to EACL.
Dec 2022: I am co-organising the 6th FEVER workshop, located with EACL'23.
July 2022: Presenting our paper on table fact-checking at NAACL '22 in Seattle and wrote a blog post about the conference.
May 2022: Attending ACL in Dublin and wrote a blog on Multimodality at ACL 2022.
April 2022: Our paper PubHealthTab: a Public Health Table-based Dataset for Evidence-based Fact Checking was accepted to NAACL.
Nov 2021: Talked at the FrauenFunk! podcast about my research, women in STEM, and doing a PhD in the UK. (German).
July 2021: I am a teaching assistant at the Oxford ML Summer School.
Dec 2020: Organising a WiML workshop at NeurIPS 2020.

Selected Publications

TANQ: An open domain dataset of table answered questions.

Mubashara Akhtar,* Chenxi Pang,* Andreea Marzoca, Yasemin Altun, Julian Martin Eisenschlos

Accepted to the Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), 2024.

Croissant: A Metadata Format for ML-Ready Datasets.

Mubashara Akhtar*, Omar Benjelloun*, Costanza Conforti*, et al.

Spotlight paper at NeurIPS 2024.

Croissant: A Metadata Format for ML-Ready Datasets.

Mubashara Akhtar, Omar Benjelloun, Costanza Conforti, et al.

DEEM workshop @SIGMOD, 2024. (best short paper award 🥇)

ChartCheck: Explainable Fact-Checking over Real-World Chart Images.

Mubashara Akhtar, Nikesh Subedi, Vivek Gupta, Sahar Tahmasebi, Oana Cocarascu, Elena Simperl.

ACL (Findings), 2024.

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.

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.

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

Awarded the AI Center fellowship from ETH Zurich (~3% acceptance rate), 2024
Best short paper award at DEEM 2024 for our paper introducing Croissant
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)