Welcome to RiTUAL

We are a multidisciplinary research group based in Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) focused on advancing the state of the art in NLP. Our team combines expertise from various domains to tackle complex scientific challenges and publish high‑impact research.

Our Research Areas

Pushing the boundaries of NLP through innovative, socially-aware research

Code-Switching and Multilingual NLP

Building inclusive NLP through code-switching and multilingual research, from robust transfer to broad multilingual and culturally diverse coverage.

Decades (ACL'23) CSFLEURS (Interspeech'25) SemRel (ACL'24)

Multimodal Learning and Benchmarking

Developing multimodal systems that integrate vision, language, and other modalities for richer understanding, with an emphasis on culturally grounded evaluation and robust benchmark design.

QIVD (ACL'24) CVQA (NeurIPS'24) MoMents (EMNLP'25) ALM100 (CVPR'25)

Affective Computing and Content Analysis

Understanding human expression and moderating online content through model-assisted analysis, spanning emotion, sentiment, safety, and misinformation.

OATS (LREC'24) Habibi (ICLR'26) Comic (LREC'24) Themes (LREC'24) EmoTrain (SemEval'25)

NLP for Social Good

Designing NLP systems that create measurable public impact, from improving access to information and education to supporting well-being, safety, and equitable participation across demographic groups.

Latest News

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Feb 2026

We have been awarded and funded by Google.org with a $1M USD for research on narrowing AI's Language Divide

Oct 2025

We have been awarded the prestigious Google Academic Research Award (GARA) for our work on safer AI Companionship and Loneliness.

Sep 2024

RiTUAL research group website hosted on GitHub