News

December 2026. Bruno Nicenboim and Giovanni Cassani are co-organising the Computational Psycholinguistics Meeting 2026, 2–4 December at Utrecht University.
October 2026. Hosein Mohebbi is one of the organisers of BlackboxNLP 2026, the ninth workshop on analysing and interpreting neural networks for NLP, held at EMNLP 2026 in Budapest on 29 October.
October 2026. Gaofei Shen presents Beyond Decodability: Reconstructing Language Model Representations with an Encoding Probe at EMNLP 2026 in Budapest, in the poster session on 25 October.
October 2026. Noortje Venhuizen has been awarded an NWO Vidi grant of 850,000 euros for the project How language refers to the world. The project studies how people combine what they see around them with knowledge of language and the world to work out what words refer to, using computer simulations to make predictions about behavioural and brain measurements.
October 2026. Post-hoc Disentanglement of Textual and Acoustic Features in Pre-trained Speech Encoders by Hosein Mohebbi, Grzegorz Chrupała, Willem Zuidema, Afra Alishahi and Ivan Titov has been accepted to Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL).
October 2026. Afra Alishahi gave the keynote at the workshop Developmental AI for Language and Cognition in Grenoble on 14–15 October, with the talk “Are computational cognitive models of human language still relevant?”
October 2026. Comparing Multi-Task Strategies for Multiple Dataset Learning in Bioacoustics by Céline Angonin, Grzegorz Chrupała and Dan Stowell has been accepted as an oral presentation at BNAIC/BeNeLearn 2026.
October 2026. Gaofei Shen demonstrated speech technology to visitors of the Weekend of Science at MindLabs on 4 October.
September 2026. Beyond Decodability: Reconstructing Language Model Representations with an Encoding Probe by Gaofei Shen, Martijn Bentum, Tom Lentz, Afra Alishahi and Grzegorz Chrupała has been accepted to EMNLP 2026.
August 2026. Afra Alishahi was one of the lecturers at the School on Analytical Connectionism, a two-week summer school on language acquisition at Chalmers and the University of Gothenburg, with a lecture on modelling human cognition in the age of LLMs.
June 2026. Tilburg hosted EAMT 2026, the 26th annual conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, from 15 to 18 June. Members of the unit were on the organising team and edited the proceedings.
May 2026. On 8 May the unit hosted a workshop on the evaluation and interpretability of spoken language systems at MindLabs, organised by the Dutch Open Speech Technology Foundation. Jelle Zuidema gave the keynote, with talks by Gaofei Shen, Hosein Mohebbi, Yuanyuan Zhang, Marianne de Heer Kloots and Charlotte Pouw.
March 2026. Javad Pourmostafa Roshan Sharami defended the PhD thesis Toward domain-specific machine translation and quality estimation systems on 4 March.