About me

I will soon start my own research group at the University of Göttingen. Our interdisciplinary research focuses on cognitively inspired language processing and multilingual models. Please reach out if you are interested in working with us! Before, I was an assistant professor for natural language processing at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

My favorite topics for a sunny coffee break: the elegance of volleyball, the ease of travelling by train, the latest novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Research News

• The book is out! Nora Hollenstein and I wrote an introduction to Cognitive Plausibility in Natural Language Processing. I talked about this topic with the NLP Highlights podcast.

• How do language models process language and how is that different to humans? At EMNLP and CoNLL in Singapore, we will present three papers looking into this topic. We investigate the representation of the input, the learning procedure, and the interpretation of the output. The first paper received the “Most Interesting Paper” award at the BabyLM challenge which aims at building smaller language models (see discussion in the New York Times). If you like this line of research, check also our earlier papers on cognitive plausibility at ACL21, NAACL21, and EACL2023_Findings.

• I have been recognized as one of the “Outstanding Reviewers” at EACL 2023 and served as area chair for cognitive modeling at ACL 2023.

• I received a personal VENI grant to work on the “Interpretability of Transfer in Multilingual Models” and have been awarded an Early Career Partnership by the Royal Dutch Academy of Science to foster interdisciplinary research on “The Human Perspective on Multilingual AI Models”. Within this line of research, we have worked on simplifying texts for the Gemeente of Amsterdam, correcting texts by learners of Dutch together with NT2, and identifying semantic drift. Our project “InTeAM: Interpretability of Text Adequacy Methods” won the “Best Project Award” by the Network Institute.

• I co-organized three workshops in 2023 and they provide a good summary of my current research interests: 1) At HumanCLAIM, we discussed cross-lingual NLP from a human-centered perspective 2) at IWDS, we stimulated interdisciplinary research to address challenges of the digital society 3) and at SIGTyp, typological knowledge plays an important role.

Sharing my knowledge and encouraging students to pursue research projects matters to me. I am certified with the University Teaching Qualification and have been teaching the following courses:

• VU Amsterdam:
  Language as Data, 2020 and 2021
  Interpretability of NLP Models, 2021
  Introduction to Natural Language processing, 2020-22
  Text Mining Domains, 2021
  Digital Humanities, 2020
  

• Uva Amsterdam:
  Foundations of Neural and Cognitive Modelling, guest lecture, 2020
  Cognitive Models of Language and Music, 2 guest lectures, 2019
  Proefstuderen: Introduction to AI, guest lecture, 2019
  

• University of Duisburg-Essen:
  Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, 2018
  Knowledge-based Systems, 2018
  

• TU Darmstadt:
  Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing, 2016
  Natural Language Processing and eLearning, practice class, 2013 and 2015
  

• Saarland University: Introduction to Computational Linguistics, practice class, 2010

I am an enthusiastic student supervisor. Contact me if you want to do a research project with me.

Many years of my life, playing volleyball had a very high priority. I played in various teams of the first and second national leagues and in the junior national team.

I am certified for teaching German as a foreign language and have been engaged in voluntary teaching activities for migrants. Now, I am a migrant myself trying to learn Dutch.

I like Italian coffee.