I am Associate Professor in the Computational Linguistics Group of the University of Groningen.

I am passionate about the statistical modeling of human languages, particularly in a multilingual context. My long-term goal is to design robust language processing algorithms that can adapt to the large variety of linguistic phenomena observed around the world.
Among others, I work towards improving the quality of Machine Translation for challenging language pairs, and making state-of-the art NLP models more interpretable.
As a cross-disciplinary research enthusiast, I'm interested in enhancing research on human language processing or language evolution with computational modeling tools.
Last but not least, I enjoy observing, interacting with, and finding daily inspiration in my two daughters and their trilingual minds in the making.

My research was funded by a Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) from 2016 to 2021. Currently, I am involved in two national-consortium projects, both funded by NWO's NWA-ORC initiatives: Interpreting deep learning models for language, speech & music (InDeep) and Low Resource Chat-based Conversational Intelligence (LESSEN). I also supervise two China Scholarship Council (CSC)-funded PhD students working on the simulation of human patterns of language learning and change. I have just started a NWO Vidi grant to improve language modeling for (low-resource) morphologically rich languages, taking inspiration from child language acquisition insights.

Want to know more about my work ? See my Research and Publications pages.

News

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  ###########      4-year PhD opening!      ###########
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Project goal: Developing computational models for the acquisition of modal verbs and their various meanings.
This is an interdisciplinary project bringing together the fields of language acquisition and computational linguistics.
Supervisory team: Annemarie van Dooren, Yevgen Matusevych, Arianna Bisazza.
Ideal candidates hold (or are in the process of obtaining) a Master degree in Computational Linguistics/Natural Language Processing, Cognitive Modeling, Psycholinguistics, or related areas.
Application deadline: 24 April 2025.   Find out more and apply HERE
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  • [Mar 2025]   I gave a keynote talk at NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025, titled "Not all Language Models need to be Large: Studying Language Evolution and Acquisition with Modern Neural Networks". Tallin was great and so was NoDaLiDa and its lively community of Nordic and Baltic NLP'ers!
  • [Nov 2024]   We have received an Outstanding Paper Award at the BabyLM Challenge (CoNLL'24 Shared Task) for our paper "BabyLM Challenge: Exploring the Effect of Variation Sets on Language Model Training Efficiency" with Akari Haga, Akiyo Fukatsu, Miyu Oba, and Yohei Oseki.
  • [Nov 2024]   Excited to see my Vidi project finally take off with dream team members Francesca Padovani (PhD) and Jaap Jumelet (postdoc).
  • [Oct 2024]   Paper accepted at CoNLL: "NeLLCom-X: A Comprehensive Neural-Agent Framework to Simulate Language Learning and Group Communication", with Yuchen Lian and Tessa Verhoef.
  • [Oct 2024]   Paper accepted at EMNLP: "Model Internals-based Answer Attribution for Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Generation", with Jirui Qi, Gabriele Sarti and Raquel Fernández [Check out the HuggingFace DEMO!]
    • Disclaimer for prospective students: I regularly receive emails from external students interested in my supervision. I do my best to reply each of them, but don't always manage. If I have paid research positions (PhD, postdoc) I'll always post them here, so no post => no position :-(
    As for research internships: I don't take students from external universities due to an already high supervision load.