Iryna Gurevych receives Milner Award and delivers Milner Prize Lecture at the Royal Society
One of Europe’s most prestigious honours in computer science
2025/11/17
Professor Iryna Gurevych, Director of the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab at Technische Universität Darmstadt, has been named the 2025 recipient of the Royal Society’s Milner Award and Lecture. The Milner Award is one of Europe’s most prestigious distinctions in computer science and is presented annually by the Royal Society to an outstanding European researcher who has made substantial contributions to the field.
As part of the official award ceremony, Iryna Gurevych delivered the Milner Prize Lecture entitled How to Spot and Debunk Misleading Content at the Royal Society in London. The lecture was held on 17 November 2025 and was also livestreamed for an international audience.
The Milner Award, established in 2012 and supported by Microsoft Research, is named after the computing pioneer Robin Milner. It is awarded by the Royal Society’s Council on the recommendation of the Milner Award Committee and includes a bronze medal and a monetary prize. With this year’s award, Iryna Gurevych becomes the first researcher from the field of natural language processing to be recognised in this way.
The award recognises her pioneering contributions to natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI), which combine a deep understanding of human language and cognition with state-of-the-art machine learning methods. Her research has helped shape several core areas of modern NLP, including sentence representations, dense retrieval, argument mining, and the detection and analysis of misinformation.
In her Milner Prize Lecture, Iryna Gurevych addressed the challenge of misleading content, a particularly complex form of misinformation in which individual facts may be technically correct but are framed to support false or distorted conclusions. She discussed how misleading claims are constructed across text, images, and visualisations, including the misuse of scientific evidence, out-of-context media, and manipulative data visualisations. Drawing on recent advances in machine learning, she demonstrated how computational methods can support both human audiences and AI systems in identifying and contextualising such content.
Her work on misleading content builds on long-standing UKP Lab research at the intersection of NLP, human-AI collaboration, and information integrity. It reflects a broader focus on making language technologies more transparent, reliable, and safe for real-world use, particularly in high-stakes and expert domains.
Beyond her role at TU Darmstadt and the UKP Lab, Iryna Gurevych is Adjunct Professor at MBZUAI (UAE) and INSAIT (Bulgaria), the inaugural LOEWE Chair of Excellence and Distinguished Professor at Germany’s National Center for Cybersecurity ATHENE, and a Fellow of both the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS).
The Milner Award and Lecture highlight the international impact of research conducted at the UKP Lab and underscore the central role of natural language processing in addressing some of the most pressing challenges of today’s digital information environment.
Resources
Scientific contact
Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych
Hochschulstraße 10, S2|02 B110
64289 Darmstadt, Germany
Phone: +49 6151 16-25290
Email: iryna.gurevych@tu-darmstadt.de
