Jad Kabbara

Postdoctoral Researcher | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

I am a postdoctoral researcher at MIT working with Prof. Deb Roy at the Center for Constructive Communication (CCC) and the Media Lab. My broad interests are in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing and its applications to address important societal problems at the intersection of social media, communication and political discourse.

I received my PhD in Computer Science in 2022 from McGill University where I was advised by Prof. Jackie Cheung. I was part of the Reasoning & Learning Lab and the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (Mila). My PhD research was at the intersection of computational pragmatics and natural language generation and natural language understanding. My work focused on the computational modeling of presupposition effects in natural language and was recognized with the ACL 2018 Best Paper Award and COLING 2022 Best Short Paper Award.

Prior to my PhD, I received a Masters in Machine Learning & Statistical Signal Processing from McGill in 2014 and a Bachelors in Computer and Communications Engineering from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 2011.

Publications »

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News

Awards

MIT Tech Review Innovators Under 35 - MENA (2023)

MIT Generative AI Impact Award (2023)

COLING 2022 Best Short Paper Award

IVADO Excellence Fellowship (2020-2022)

Facebook PhD Fellowship 2019 Finalist

ACL 2018 Best Paper Award

Bourse du Centre de Recherche Informatique de Montréal (CRIM) pour Études Supérieures (2017-2019)

Bourse d'Excellence du Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Nature et Technologies (FRQNT) (2017-2018)

Graduate Excellence Award (McGill University) (2015-2017)

Bourse d'Excellence pour Étudiants Étrangers (Government of Quebec) (2011-2013)

Teaching

Co-Instructor:

Teaching Assistant

Professional Service

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