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
**********************************************************************************########### 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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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.
