Ahmed El-Kishky

NLP Researcher   ahelk [AT]   Github     LinkedIn     Google Scholar   Curriculum Vitae

About

I am a machine learning researcher with experience in natural language processing, including large language models, machine translation, and information extraction. I also work on graph machine learning for representation learning and recommender systems. My current focus is on reinforcement learning for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models.

I graduated with a PhD from the Data Mining Group (DMG) at UIUC, where I had the privilege to be advised by Jiawei Han. I was also fortunate enough to have had my PhD studies funded by both an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and an NDSEG Graduate Research Fellowship.

Publications

• PRE-PRINT Competitive Programming with Large Reasoning Models
  OpenAI: Ahmed El-Kishky, Alexander Wei, Andre Saraiva, Borys Minaiev, Daniel Selsam, David Dohan, Francis Song, Hunter Lightman, Ignasi Clavera, Jakub Pachocki, Jerry Tworek, Lorenz Kuhn, Lukasz Kaiser, Mark Chen, Max Schwarzer, Mostafa Rohaninejad, Nat McAleese, o3 contributors, Oleg Mürk, Rhythm Garg, Rui Shu, Szymon Sidor, Vineet Kosaraju, Wenda Zhou. Technical Report, Feb. 2025.
  

• PRE-PRINT OpenAI o1 System Card
  OpenAI: Aaron Jaech, Adam Kalai, Adam Lerer, Adam Richardson, Ahmed El-Kishky, Aiden Low, Alec Helyar, Aleksander Madry and others. System Card, Dec. 2024.
  

• PRE-PRINT Simple Temporal Adaptation to Changing Label Sets: Hashtag Prediction via Dense KNN
  Fatemehsadat Mireshghallah, Nikolai Vogler, Junxian He, Omar Florez, Ahmed El-Kishky, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick. EMNLP, Dec., 2023.
  

• PAPER TwHIN-BERT: A Socially-Enriched Pre-trained Language Model for Multilingual Tweet Representations
  Xinyang Zhang, Yury Malkov, Omar Florez, Serim Park, Brian McWilliams, Jiawei Han, Ahmed El-Kishky. KDD 2023, Aug. 2023.
  Open source model and datasets released.

• PAPER kNN-Embed: Locally Smoothed Embedding Mixtures for Multi-interest Candidate Generation
  Ahmed El-Kishky, Thomas Markovich, Kenny Leung, Frank Portman, Aria Haghighi, Ying Xiao. PAKDD, Osaka, Japan, May, 2023.
  

• PAPER Learning Stance Embeddings from Signed Social Graphs
  John Pougué-Biyong, Akshay Gupta, Aria Haghighi, Ahmed El-Kishky. WSDM, Feb. 2023.
  BEST PAPER AWARD

• PAPER NTULM: Enriching Social Media Text Representations with Non-Textual Units
  Jinning Li, Shubhanshu Mishra, Ahmed El-Kishky, Sneha Mehta, Vivek Kulkarni. WNUT, Oct. 2022.
  

• PRE-PRINT MiCRO: Multi-interest Candidate Retrieval Online
  Frank Portman, Stephen Ragain, Ahmed El-Kishky. arXiv, Oct. 2022.
  

• PAPER TwHIN: Embedding the Twitter Heterogeneous Information Network for Personalized Recommendation
  Ahmed El-Kishky, Thomas Markovich, Serim Park, Chetan Verma, Baekjin Kim, Ramy Eskander, Yury Malkov, Frank Portman, Sofia Samaniego, Ying Xiao, Aria Haghighi. KDD, Washington, DC, Aug. 2022.
  

• PAPER Quality Estimation without Human-labeled Data
  Yi-lin Tuan, Ahmed El-Kishky, Adithya Renduchintala, Vishrav Chaudhary, Francisco Guzman, Lucia Specia. EACL, Kyiv, Ukraine, April 2021.
  

• PAPER XLEnt: Mining Cross-lingual Entities with Lexical-Semantic-Phonetic Word Alignment
  Ahmed El-Kishky, James Cross, Adithya Renduchintala, Francisco Guzman, Philipp Koehn. Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Nov. 2021.
  Open source dataset released.

• PAPER As Easy as 1, 2, 3: Behavioural Testing of NMT Systems for Numerical Translation
  Jun Wang, Chang Xu, Francisco Guzman, Ahmed El-Kishky, Benjamin Rubinstein, Trevor Cohn. Association of Computing Linguistics (ACL), Bangkok, Thailand, Aug. 2021.
  

• PAPER Putting Words Into the System’s Mouth: A Targeted Attack on Neural Machine Translation Using Monolingual Data Poisoning
  Jun Wang, Chang Xu, Francisco Guzman, Ahmed El-Kishky, Yuqing Tang, Benjamin Rubinstein, Trevor Cohn. ACL, Bangkok, Thailand, Aug. 2021.
  

• PAPER Adapting High-resource NMT Models to Translate Low-resource Related Languages without Parallel Data
  Wei-jen Ko, Ahmed El-Kishky, Adithya Renduchintala, Vishrav Chaudhary, Naman Goyal, Francisco Guzman, Pascale Fung, Mona Diab, Philipp Koehn. ACL, Bangkok, Thailand, Aug. 2021.
  

• PAPER Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation
  Angela Fan, Shruti Bhosale, Holger Schwenk, Zhiyi Ma, Ahmed El-Kishky, Siddharth Goyal, Mandeep Baines, Onur Celebi, Guillaume Wenzek, Vishrav Chaudhary, Naman Goyal, Tom Birch, Vitaliy Liptchinsky, Sergey Edunov, Eduard Grave, Michael Auli, Armand Joulin. JMLR, Online, March 2021.
  

• PAPER Findings of the WMT 2020 Shared Task on Parallel Corpus Filtering
  Philipp Koehn, Vishrav Chaudhary, Ahmed El-Kishky, Naman Goyal, Peng-Jen Chen, Francisco Guzman. WMT, Online, April 2020.
  

• PAPER CCAligned: A Massive Collection of Crosslingual Web-Document Pairs
  Ahmed El-Kishky, Vishrav Chaudhary, Francisco Guzman, Philipp Koehn. EMNLP, Online, April 2020.
  Open source dataset released.

• PAPER An Exploratory Study on Multilingual Quality Estimation
  Shuo Sun, Marina Fomicheva, Frederic Blain, Vishrav Chaudhary, Ahmed El-Kishky, Adithya Renduchintala, Francisco Guzman, Lucia Specia. EMNLP, Online, April 2020.
  

• PAPER Massively Multilingual Document Alignment with Cross-lingual Sentence-Mover’s Distance
  Ahmed El-Kishky, Francisco Guzman. AACL-IJCNLP, Online, Dec. 2020.
  

• PAPER Leveraging Pretrained Image Classifiers for Language-Based Segmentation
  David Golub, Ahmed El-Kishky, Roberto Martín-Martín. WACV, Colorado, March 2020.
  

• PAPER Facebook AI’s WAT19 Myanmar-English Translation Task Submission
  Peng-Jen Chen, Jiajun Shen, Matt Le, Vishrav Chaudhary, Ahmed El-Kishky, Guillaume Wenzek, Myle Ott, Marc'Aurelio Ranzato. WAT, Hong Kong, China, Nov. 2019.
  

• PAPER Constrained Sequence-to-sequence Semitic Root Extraction for Enriching Word Embeddings
  Ahmed El-Kishky, Xingyu Fu, Aseel Addawood, Nahim Sobh, Clare Voss, Jiawei Han. WANLP, Florence, Italy, June 2019.
  

• PAPER Mining News Events from Comparable News Corpora: A Multi-Attribute Proximity Network Modeling Approach
  Hyungsul Kim, Ahmed El-Kishky, Xiang Ren, Jiawei Han. IEEE Big Data, Los Angeles, CA, Dec. 2019.
  

• PAPER Parsimonious Morpheme Segmentation with an Application to Enriching Word Embeddings
  Ahmed El-Kishky, Frank Xu, Aston Zhang, Jiawei Han. IEEE Big Data, Los Angeles, CA, Dec. 2019.
  

• PAPER Integrating local context and global cohesiveness for open information extraction
  Qi Zhu, Xiang Ren, Jingbo Shang, Yu Zhang, Ahmed El-Kishky, Jiawei Han. WSDM, Houston, TX, Jan. 2019.
  

• PAPER Active Learning on Heterogenous Information Networks: A Multi-armed Bandit Approach
  Doris Xin, Ahmed El-Kishky, De Liao, Brandon Norick, Jiawei Han. ICDM, Singapore, Dec. 2018.
  

• PAPER Entropy-Based Subword Mining for Word Embeddings
  Ahmed El-Kishky, Frank Xu, Aston Zhang, Stephen Macke, Jiawei Han. SCLeM Workshop at 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), New Orleans, USA, June 2018.
  

• PAPER Scalable Topical Phrase Mining from Text Corpora
  Ahmed El-Kishky, Yanglei Song, Chi Wang, Clare Voss, Jiawei Han. VLDB, Kohala Coast, Hawai'i, Aug. 2015.
  

• PAPER ClusType: Effective Entity Recognition and Typing by Relation Phrase-Based Clustering
  Xiang Ren, Ahmed El-Kishky, Chi Wang, Fangbo Tao, Clare Voss, Heng Ji, Jiawei Han. KDD, Sydney, Australia, Aug. 2015.
  

• PAPER Incorporating World Knowledge to Document Clustering via Heterogeneous Information Networks
  Chenguang Wang, Yanglei Song, Ahmed El-Kishky, Dan Roth, Ming Zhang, Jiawei Han. KDD, Sydney, Australia, Aug. 2015.
  

• PAPER NewsNetExplorer: Automatic Construction and Exploration of News Information Networks
  Fangbo Tao, George Brova, Jiawei Han, Heng Ji, Chi Wang, Brandon Norick, Ahmed El-Kishky, Jialu Liu, Xiang Ren, Yizhou Sun. KDD, Sydney, Australia, Aug. 2015.
  

• PAPER Agglomerative Clustering of Bagged Data Using Joint Distributions
  David Arbour, James Atwood, Ahmed El-Kishky, David Jensen. ICML - SLG, Atlanta, Georgia, Aug. 2013.
  

• PAPER Assessing Entropy and Fractal Dimensions as Discriminants of Seizures in EEG Time Series
  Ahmed El-Kishky. ISSPA, Montreal, Canada, July, 2012.