I am a linguist, interested in theoretical linguistics and in natural language processing. I am an Assistant Professor in Computational Linguistics (UD1, if you know the Dutch system) at Utrecht University, working in the Language and Communication group, part of the Institute for Language Sciences. I am also a member of the NLP@U special interest group. Before September 2024, I was an Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen, Center for Language and Cognition (CLCG), Computational Linguistics Group.

In Utrecht, I teach in the Applied Data Science master program and in the bachelor program Communication and Information Science. I am open to supervise (research) master theses in data science, AI and theoretical linguistics (semantics, mostly).

I wrote up a small thing that contains notes for my ‘Linguistics for Language Technology’ 2023 course at RuG. The course is over, but people seem to like the website, so if you are here for the course notes, check them out!

News

• We (Yasu Sudo, Stavroula Alexandropoulou and I) will present our work on priming English and Russian NPIs at the Amsterdam Colloquium 18-20 December 2024 (link to poster will appear here later!).
• EMNLP/CoNLL 2024: Didn’t do anything for main sessions this time, but check out our paper for the BabyLM challenge (a CoNLL workshop) and our (other set of co-authors) paper on individuation in text-only vs multimodal models (NLP4Science workshop at EMNLP).
• I gave a talk at the first 2024/2025 meeting of the special interest group NLP@U. Check out the slides!
• [This is a big one] I am joining Utrecht University (Institute for Language Sciences) as Assistant Professor in September 2024! I did my PhD there, so it feels like going home (good).
• My short research visit to Trento in April 2024 resulted in this joint work with Jaap Jumelet, Jelle Zuidema and Jakub Szymanik: “Black Big Boxes: Do Language Models Hide a Theory of Adjective Order?” (under revision at TACL, preprint)
• Yasu Sudo, Stavroula Alexandropoulou and I presetned our work on linguistic acceptability priming for English NPI any at ELM3
• Preprint of our survey Abzianidze, Lasha, Lisa Bylinina and Denis Paperno ‘Semantics and Deep Learning’ written for Cambridge Elements in Semantics is up on LingBuzz. We expect it to be published by CUP as a little book very soon (early 2025).
• Paper detailing our (Lukas Edman’s and mine) approach to the BabyLM challenge is up on ACL Anthology: “Too Much Information: Keeping Training Simple for BabyLMs”
• Paper (with Ekaterina Garmash and Alexey Tikhonov) “Connecting degree and polarity: An artificial language learning study” accepted to EMNLP 2023 main! [preprint]