Isabelle Augenstein

Isabelle Augenstein is a Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Computer Science (DIKU), where she heads the Copenhagen Natural Language Understanding (CopeNLU) research group and the Natural Language Processing section. She is also a co-lead of the Danish Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Denmark's largest research center initiated by the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science. In October 2022, she became Denmark's youngest ever female full professor.

Dr. Augenstein earned her undergraduate degree in Computational Linguistics and Psychology from Heidelberg University, followed by a Master's in Computational Linguistics. She completed her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Sheffield under the supervision of Dr. Diana Maynard and Prof. Fabio Ciravegna. In 2021, she earned a Habilitation at the University of Copenhagen in Explainable Fact-checking.

Professor Augenstein's primary research focuses on fair and accountable Natural Language Processing, with particular emphasis on explainability, factuality, and bias detection. Her work spans multiple subfields including automated fact-checking, stance detection, gender bias analysis, and cultural bias in language models. She has pioneered research in explainable fact-checking, developing methods that not only predict claim veracity but also provide meaningful explanations of the decision-making process. Her research group has produced numerous influential papers on measuring model fragility, quantifying gender biases, and developing robust fact-checking systems that account for distribution shifts.

Her significant contributions have been recognized with several prestigious awards:

• ERC Starting Grant on 'Explainable and Robust Automatic Fact Checking'
• DFF Sapere Aude Research Leader fellowship on 'Learning to Explain Attitudes on Social Media'
• Karen Spärck Jones Award from the British Computing Society and Bloomberg
• Hartmann Diploma Prize from the Hartmann Foundation
• Member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters since 2024

Professor Augenstein has secured significant research funding including her ERC Starting Grant supporting five years of blue-sky research. She actively mentors PhD students and postdoctoral researchers through her 'ExplainYourself' project. She served as President of SIGDAT (which organizes the EMNLP conference series), having previously held leadership roles as Vice President and Vice President-Elect. She is a co-founder of Widening NLP (WiNLP), an initiative to increase diversity in the NLP community, and maintains the BIG Directory of underrepresented groups in NLP.

She leads the Copenhagen Natural Language Understanding (CopeNLU) research group, which relocated to the historic Østervold Observatory in Copenhagen's Botanical Gardens in 2023. The group focuses on developing methods for explainable and robust natural language understanding, with applications in fact-checking, bias detection, and social media analysis. Professor Augenstein also co-leads the Speech and Language collaboratory at the Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence, where her team investigates how language models can better serve diverse populations while maintaining accountability and transparency.