Hiba Arnaout

Hiba Arnaout is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab, Department of Computer Science, TU Darmstadt, where she also served as a part-time lecturer from April to July 2024. She earned her PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics under the supervision of Prof. Gerhard Weikum and Prof. Simon Razniewski, and her Master's and Bachelor's degrees from the American University of Beirut and Haigazian University, respectively.

Education:

• PhD in Computer Science, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany (Feb 2018 – Oct 2023)
• Master of Computer Science, American University of Beirut, Lebanon (Feb 2014 – Feb 2017)
• Bachelor of Computer Science, Haigazian University, Beirut, Lebanon (Feb 2010 – Jun 2013)

Research Interests:

Hiba's work lies at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, and Knowledge Graphs. She specializes in discovering and utilizing negative knowledge in open-world knowledge bases like Wikidata. Her current research extends into AI for mental health, research impact analysis, and culturally-aware NLP. She has pioneered methods for enriching knowledge graphs with informative negative statements, leading to interactive systems like UnCommonSense and Wikinegata.

Publication Trends:

Her recent publications (2023–2025) reflect a clear trajectory from foundational work on negation in knowledge bases toward broader applications in research evaluation and mental health. She increasingly employs large language models and temporal analysis, demonstrating a shift toward impact-driven and human-centric AI research. Her work spans journals, conferences, demos, and books, showcasing both technical depth and dissemination excellence.

Scientific Awards:

• Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) Distinguished Dissertation Award (2024)
• Bosch Reward for invention: Knowledge Graph Repair Using Ontologies and LMs (2022)
• Audience-choice Best Paper Award at AKBC (2020)
• Best Student Paper Award Nominee at IC3K'17 (2017)
• Full Graduate Assistantship at AUB (2014)
• Participation in DFG grant discussion (2021)

Advising and Grants:

Hiba actively supervises students, currently guiding multiple BSc and MSc theses on topics like mental health trend tracking, culturally-aware emotional support, and therapy session annotation. While no direct grant leadership is mentioned, she contributed to a DFG grant proposal on negative knowledge and has received recognition from Bosch for her inventive work, indicating strong industry and academic collaboration.

Labs and Teams:

She is a core member of the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab at TU Darmstadt, led by Prof. Iryna Gurevych. Previously, she was affiliated with the Databases and Information Systems Group at Max Planck Institute for Informatics and collaborated with researchers at The University of Edinburgh and Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence.