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

I am passionate about the statistical modeling of languages, particularly in a multilingual context, and my long-term goal is to design robust NLP 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 initiative: Interpreting deep learning models for language, speech & music (InDeep) and Low Resource Chat-based Conversational Intelligence (LESSEN).

Interested in my work ? Also see my Research page.


News

  • [Oct 2022]   Two papers accepted at EMNLP: "DivEMT: Neural Machine Translation Post-Editing Effort Across Typologically Diverse Languages", with Gabriele Sarti, Ana Guerberof-Arenas, and Antonio Toral. "Hyper-X: A Unified Hypernetwork for Multi-Task Multilingual Transfer", with Ahmet Üstün, Gosse Bouma, Gertjan van Noord and Sebastian Ruder.
  • [Sept 2022] We're presenting a poster at the Machine Learning and the Evolution of Language Workshop (ml4evolang@JCoLE): "Challenges in Simulating the Word Order vs. Case Marking Trade-off with Neural Agents" with Yuchen Lian and Tessa Verhoef.
  • [Apr 2022]   We've restructured the NLP course of the MSc Information Science, adding lots of new practicals and a brand new set of project topics. The course ended yesterday with a 4-hour session of project presentations and a Best Project Award. A big thanks to Gabriele Sarti for embarking in this adventure with me, and to all the students for their enthusiastic participation!
  • [Apr 2022]   We've been awarded a new NWO National Science Agenda grant on Low Resource Chat-based Conversational Intelligence (LESSEN)! Looking forward to collaborating with UvA, Leiden University, Radboud University, Rasa, Bol.com, KPN, and more... See the official news item!
  • [Apr 2022]   Paper published in Computational Linguistics: "UDapter: Typology-based Language Adapters for Multilingual Dependency Parsing and Sequence Labeling", with Ahmet Üstün, Gosse Bouma, and Gertjan van Noord.
  • [Apr 2022]   Paper accepted at LREC: "Evaluating Pre-training Objectives for Low-Resource Translation into Morphologically Rich Languages", with Prajit Dhar and Gertjan van Noord.