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Academic experience, education, and service. Updated October 2026.

General Information

Full Name Irina Nikishina
Date of Birth 13th December 1995
Languages Russian (native), English (CAE C1), French (DALF C1), German (Goethe-Zertifikat B2), Arabic (A2)

Education

Work Experience

  • Sep 2026–present
    Postdoctoral Researcher
    Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Abu Dhabi, UAE
  • Sep 2025–Sep 2026
    Independent Researcher
    Abu Dhabi, UAE
    • Collaboration with MBZUAI; student supervision at Universität Hamburg and HSE University; AIST 2026 organizing committee.
  • Aug 2022–Sep 2025
    Postdoctoral Researcher
    Universität Hamburg, Germany
  • 2021-2022
    Research Engineer (Python)
    Skoltech
    • dataset annotation and annotation verification; technical support for the Text Detoxification project
  • 2021
    Data Scientist, Python NLP engineer
    Innoscripta
    • Developing system for keyword search, improve NER for extracting keywords and German product names, management of keyword annotation in Doccano for the German language
  • 2017-2019
    Research assistant in Python and Java in the Texterra team
    ISP RAS
  • 2018
    Summer internship
    MrBot
    • Developing dialogue system architecture in Python
  • 2017
    Junior software engineer
    NetCracker
    • Developing a T-SDN controller automatic testing system (selenium, requests, openpyxl, pyyaml)
  • 2016
    Summer internship
    Franche-Comte University, Besancon, France
    • Developing a Python tool for interpreting queries in Relational Algebra

Organizing Experience

  • Jan–Oct 2026
    AIST 2026
    • Organizing committee member, Astana, Kazakhstan.
    • Conference management, call for papers, and website updates.
  • 2024
    Analysis of Images, Social Networks and Texts
    • a member of AIST organizing committee,
    • conference management, contacting authors/participants, call for papers design and distribution, sending invitations to the reviewers, website design and publishing updates on the website.
  • 2024
    TextGraphs-17
    • member of TextGraphs-17 organizing committee Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing collocated with ACL-2024 in Bangkok, Thailand on August 11–16, 2024
    • organizing shared task in Codalab
  • 2023
    Analysis of Images, Social Networks and Texts
    • a member of AIST organizing committee,
    • conference management, contacting authors/participants, call for papers design and distribution, sending invitations to the reviewers, website design and publishing updates on the website.
  • 2022
    RuArg-2022 shared task
    • organizer of Dialogue 2022 shared task on Argument Mining for the Russian Language
    • links - Github, CodaLab
  • 2022
    RUSSE'2022 shared task
    • organiser of the shared task on Russian Text Detoxification Based on Parallel Corpora for the Dialogue-2022 conference
    • links Github, CodaLab
  • 2021
    Analysis of Images, Social Networks and Texts
    • a member of AIST organizing committee,
    • conference management, contacting authors/participants, call for papers design and distribution, sending invitations to the reviewers, website design and publishing updates on the website.
  • 2020
    Analysis of Images, Social Networks and Texts
    • a member of AIST organizing committee,
    • conference management, contacting authors/participants, call for papers design and distribution, sending invitations to the reviewers, website design and publishing updates on the website.
  • 2020
    RUSSE'2020 shared task
    • organiser of the shared task on Taxonomy enrichment for the Dialogue-2020 conference
    • links - Github, CodaLab

Reviewing

  • ACL Rolling Review (ARR)
    • Area chair since September 2025; 10 papers in October 2025 and 5 in January 2026.
  • ACL
    • 8 papers in 2025, 4 papers in 2024, 3 papers in 2023, 1 paper in 2020 as subreviewer
  • EMNLP
    • 4 papers 2024, 3 papers in 2023
  • LREC-COLING 2024
    • 3 papers in 2024
  • HPCMASC24
    • 1 paper
  • KONVENS 2023
    • 1 paper in 2023
  • EMNLP
    • 4 papers 2024, 3 papers in 2023
  • ICLR 2021
    • 1 paper as sub-reviewer in 2021
  • J Machine Learning 2021
    • 1 paper as sub-reviewer

Invited Talks

  • March 2025
    • MBZUAI, UAE — Application of Large Language Models to Comparative QA and Low-Resource Languages.
    • University of Copenhagen, Denmark — Application of Large Language Models to Comparative QA and Low-Resource Languages.
  • 2024
    • HSE University, Guest seminar on “Taxonomy Enrichment with LLMs”
    • ISLE Expert Online Forum, Panelist on the topic “Linguistics versus AI”
  • 2023
    • MBZUAI, UAE, Guest talk on “Comparative Question Answering“ and “Taxonomy Enrichment“
    • NLP Group in Oslo, Norway, Guest seminar on “Taxonomy Enrichment“ (based on PhD thesis)
  • 2022
    • Guest seminar on “Taxonomy Enrichment“ (based on the PhD thesis)
    • Indiana University, USA, Guest seminar on “Taxonomy Enrichment“ (based on the PhD thesis)
  • 2021
    • AIST conference, Tbilisi, Georgia, Guest talk on “Taxonomy Enrichment with Texts and Graph Vector Representations“

Awards

  • Junction 2021, Empathy Challenge (third prize). The adaptation of text detoxification research results for a gaming industry use-case.

Academic Interests

  • Question Answering,
  • Argument Mining,
  • Retrieval Augmented Generation,
  • Lexical Semantics,
  • Taxonomies, Taxonomy Enrichment,
  • Detoxification,
  • Relation Extraction,
  • Entity Linking,
  • Entity Disambiguation,
  • Linguistics

Other Interests

  • Hobbies: traveling, museums, art galleries,painting, handmade beaded jewelry, France, French culture, foreign languages, gym, ping-pong, snowboarding