Talent doesn’t have to leave: what three years of DisAI taught us

When we started the DisAI project three years ago, we knew it would push our research forward. What we didn’t expect was just how much it would shape the people around us. Looking back now, as the project wraps up, what stands out the most isn’t just the publications or datasets. It’s the young researchers who grew with us, the partners who became colleagues and friends, and the reminder that high-quality research doesn’t have to happen elsewhere. It can happen here in Slovakia, too.

One of the biggest joys of the project was watching our researchers get opportunities that truly helped them grow. Through DisAI, our team could spend time at places like DFKI in Germany, CERTH in Greece, or the University of Copenhagen.

Reflecting on his experience at DFKI, our PhD student Ivan Vykopal said: “My stay at DFKI showed me how research is conducted abroad. Conversations with the researchers there helped me deepen my expertise and establish new collaborations that led to joint publications,” he highlighted. “Consultations with the project partners and with external mentor Simon Ostermann from DFKI allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of the domain and publish at well-recognized international conferences,” he added.

For us, this is the core of why KInIT exists: to give young Slovak researchers the kind of opportunities that make them feel they don’t have to leave the country to build a meaningful career.

DisAI also helped us bring world-class expertise directly to Slovakia. During our summer school and other educational events, students could meet people from Google, Meta, the Max Planck Institute and several top universities. We’re also proud that we managed to organize one of the research tasks for SemEval, a well-known international workshop. More than 170 researchers from around the world joined, and the results were presented at ACL 2025 in Vienna, one of the most prestigious NLP conferences.

Together with our partners from DFKI, CERTH, and the University of Copenhagen, we focused on claim matching, that is, linking together statements that express the same idea. It’s a surprisingly difficult problem and a crucial one for anyone working with fact-checking or tackling disinformation.

Throughout the project, we proposed new methods, built datasets and published more than 15 papers at top-tier venues. But beyond the numbers, this work helped us grow as a team. We improved our technical infrastructure, refined how we run research projects and strengthened the areas of NLP we care about most.

As our project’s principal investigator Marián Šimko put it: “The DisAI project has significantly helped expand KInIT’s expert capacity in selected areas of natural language processing, which we were able to apply in our research focused on combating disinformation.”

Most importantly, DisAI helped people grow. Those people will shape what Slovak research looks like in the years to come. Connecting our institute with dozens of young talents didn’t just strengthen our current team, it helped build future researchers, too. And to us, that’s the kind of impact that lasts.

The project also reaffirmed something we deeply believe; innovation doesn’t have to leave Slovakia to succeed. With the right support, the right partners and the right environment, we can do exceptional research right here at home. And that’s exactly what we plan to keep doing.