Research

Audience and speakers at a workshop in a seminar room at MindLabs, Tilburg — Workshop on evaluation and interpretability of spoken language systems, MindLabs Tilburg, May 2026. Lunch at EAMT 2026, the conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, MindLabs Tilburg, June 2026. The team behind the tutorial on interpretability techniques for speech models, Interspeech 2025, Rotterdam, August 2025. Best Thesis Award at EAMT 2026, Tilburg, June 2026. Computational Psycholinguistics Meeting 2025, Utrecht, December 2025. Photo: Ece Takmaz.

Conference attendees eating and talking at tables in the MindLabs atrium, seen from above — Workshop on evaluation and interpretability of spoken language systems, MindLabs Tilburg, May 2026. Lunch at EAMT 2026, the conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, MindLabs Tilburg, June 2026. The team behind the tutorial on interpretability techniques for speech models, Interspeech 2025, Rotterdam, August 2025. Best Thesis Award at EAMT 2026, Tilburg, June 2026. Computational Psycholinguistics Meeting 2025, Utrecht, December 2025. Photo: Ece Takmaz.

We are a research unit of the Center for Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence at Tilburg University.

Our research ranges from language science to language technology and broader applications of language models in AI. We study language and communication in biological and artificial systems using lab experiments and computational modelling. We analyse neural models of text and speech to discover what information they encode and what algorithms they learn. We develop and evaluate language technologies, especially translation and sign language systems, with a focus on fairness and privacy.

Selected recent papers

Cassani and Colombo (2026). Thickness Is More Than Affective Valence: Evaluative Language Through the Lenses of Psycholinguistics. Cognitive Science.
Venhuizen and Brouwer (2025). Referential retrieval and integration in language comprehension: An electrophysiological perspective. Psychological Review.
Shen et al. (2024). Encoding of lexical tone in self-supervised models of spoken language. NAACL 2024.
Vanmassenhove (2026). Losing our Tail, Again: (Un)Natural Selection & Multilingual LLMs. ACL 2026.
Lepp et al. (2025). Co-Creation for Sign Language Processing and Translation Technology. Information.

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