Research in the Natural Language Processing and Digital Humanities unit focuses on automated analysis, interpretation and generation of human language and their extension towards language technology. Our work encompasses a range of topics within natural language processing (NLP), such as syntactic parsing, computational semantics and pragmatics, discourse processing, dialogue modelling, machine translation and multilingual NLP.
Our interdisciplinary focus, incorporating insights from linguistics, cognitive science, psychology and machine learning, gives our group’s research a unique profile, having led to numerous distinctive contributions over four decades. Whilst well-known for its influential research in the areas of statistical parsing, syntax based machine translation and semantic role labeling, recently the group has pioneered methods for interpretability of neural models, graph neural networks for NLP and few-shot learning applied to NLP tasks.
Another prominent research direction focuses on the development of societally-oriented and responsible NLP technology, as well as applications in digital humanities, media studies and computational social science. To this end, the group has explored how statistical and neural models can retrieve information from text to help answer questions in the humanities, ranging from history to philosophy, and aid large-scale data-driven analysis of cultural artifacts.
Unit Leaders
- Ekaterina Shutova
- Jelle Zuidema (deputy)
Senior Staff
- Erman Acar
- Davide Beraldo
- Tobias Blanke
- Jelke Bloem
- Rens Bod
- Roberto Cerina
- Giovanni Cinà
- Raquel Fernández
- Wilker Ferreira Aziz
- Bharath Ganesh
- Raquel Garrido Alhama
- Marloes Geboers
- Jaap Kamps
- Houda Lamqaddam
- Martha Lewis
- Delfina Martinez Pandiani
- Gabriel Pereira
- Sandro Pezzelle
- Khalil Sima'an
- Ivan Titov
- Petter Törnberg
- Daniel Wiechmann
Postdocs
PhD Candidates
- Seth Aycock
- Joris Baan
- Jan Bakker
- Anna Bavaresco
- Orsola Borrini
- Congfeng Cao
- Rochelle Choenni
- Marianne de Heer Kloots
- Madhukar Dwivedi
- Pedro Ferreira
- John Gkountouras
- Michael Hanna
- Niels van der Heijden
- Evgenia Ilia
- Jaap Jumelet
- Alina Leidinger
- Jason Lin
- Bruno Nadalic Sotic
- Vera Neplenbroek
- Charlotte Pouw
- Angela van Sprang
- Aditya Surikuchi
- Maria Tepei
- Xiaoyu Tong
- Marcel Vélez Vásquez
- Puyu Yang
- Zhi Zhang
Research support staff
Guest Researchers
- Andreas van Cranenburgh
- María Marín Morales
- Walter Paci
- David Rau
- Maximilian Spliethöver
- Massimo Stefan
ILLC members connected to the unit by additional affiliation
- Hein van den Berg (EPS)
- Arianna Betti (EPS)
- Federica Russo (EPS)
- James Trujillo (LMC)
- Oskar van der Wal (FSPL)
For project grants associated with this project, see here.