Rico Sennrich

Nominations for ACL 2026 Test-of-Time Paper Award Test-of-Time papers in Computational Linguistics should describe research that has had long-lasting influence on the field. That is, they should have had a significant impact on a subarea of CL, acros...

🏆 ACL is now accepting nominations for the 2026 Test-of-Time (ToT) Paper Awards.

Up to four papers from ACL-affiliated events in 2001 and 2016 (including workshops) will be honored for lasting impact on computational linguistics.

📨 Submit nominations by Mar 16: forms.gle/ZdsALz3RBS97... #NLProc

📣 We’re pleased to announce that our department will co-organize the 11th edition of the SwissText conference!
#SwissText2026 will take place on 10 June 2026, hosted at the University of Zurich (Campus Oerlikon). Save the date!

www.swisstext.org/current/

#NLProc #UZHai #CompLing

📣 SwissText 2026 – Call for Papers is open!

🎯 Special theme: #ReproducibleNLP
📅 Submission deadline: 17 March 2026
📍 Zurich, Switzerland · 10 June 2026

www.swisstext.org/call-for-pap...

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LINGUIST List 36.3752 Jobs: Computational Linguistics: Professor of Computational Linguistics, University of Geneva, Switzerland The LINGUIST List, International Linguistics Community Online.

Tenure-track Assistant Professor position in computational linguistics at UNIGE / @nccrlanguage.bsky.social The application deadline is around the corner (Jan 15)- don't miss it! linguistlist.org/issues/36/37...

Take a look at how we challenge state-of-the-art NLP systems to recognize token-level semantic differences across languages with our new SwissGov-RSD dataset! @vamvas.bsky.social @ricosennrich.bsky.social

Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2512.075...
Dataset: huggingface.co/datasets/Zur...

#NLProc

Iuliia Thorbecke wearing her Docotor's hat that was decorated by other PhD students of our department

Congratulations to Iuliia Thorbecke (Nigmatulina), who just passed the viva of her PhD on using contextual information to improve automatic speech recognition, for example using radar flight information to better transcribe air traffic communication.

💥Introducing new paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17715, QueST — train specialized generators to create challenging coding problems.
From Qwen3-8B-Base
✅ 100K synthetic problems: better than Qwen3-8B
✅ Combining with human written problems: matches DeepSeek-R1-671B
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📢 Announcing the First Workshop on Multilingual and Multicultural Evaluation (MME) at #EACL2026 🇲🇦

MME focuses on resources, metrics & methodologies for evaluating multilingual systems! multilingual-multicultural-evaluation.github.io

📅 Workshop Mar 24–29, 2026
🗓️ Submit by Dec 19, 2025

I am recruiting PhD students to start in 2026! If you are interested in robustness, training dynamics, interpretability for scientific understanding, or the science of LLM analysis you should apply. BU is building a huge LLM analysis/interp group and you’ll be joining at the ground floor.

recent picture of Martin Volk

It is with deep sorrow that we bid farewell to Prof. Dr. Martin Volk, who passed away on 15 September 2025 at the age of 64 after a brief and sudden illness. www.cl.uzh.ch/en/about-us/...

🚨New Preprint!

In multilingual models, the same meaning can take far more tokens in some languages, penalizing users of underrepresented languages with worse performance and higher API costs. Our Parity-aware BPE algorithm is a step toward addressing this issue: 🧵

Sina Ahmadi receiving award.

Congratulations to @sinaahmadi.bsky.social and co-authors for receiving an ACL 2025 Outstanding Paper Award for PARME: Parallel Corpora for Low-Resourced Middle Eastern Languages!

aclanthology.org/2025.acl-lon...

Test of time awards at #acl2025

Sina Ahmadi, Rico Sennrich, Michelle Wastl, Jannis Vamvas, Andrianos Michail from the Department of Computational Linguistics posing in front of the at ACL 2025 Vienna step-and-repeat banner

We're proud to see our researchers sharing their latest work: @sinaahmadi.bsky.social, @ricosennrich.bsky.social, @michellewastl.bsky.social, @vamvas.bsky.social and Andrianos Michail (pictured) and many others.
If you’re at #ACL, stop by to learn more!

And here is the Winner:

🏆 Sewon Min: Rethinking Data Use in Large Language Models.
Min’s dissertation provides key insights into the behavior and capabilities of large language models, in particular in-context learning. Its findings have impacted the core of NLP today.

Arrived in Vienna ready for #ACL2025NLP!

Excited to present papers with @vamvas.bsky.social @ricosennrich.bsky.social on Unsupervised Translation Direction Detection and Multilingual Hallucination Detection!

Come say hi! 👋
#NLProc #NLP #NMT #LLMs

We invite you to take part in the third Terminology shared task at WMT, co-organized by one of our students @kiryukhasemenov.bsky.social . This year, it features more language pairs, domains and subtracks than the last one in 2023.

More details at the website: www2.statmt.org/wmt25/termin...

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh, the University of Zurich, Supertext, and Microsoft introduce ACES, a challenging benchmark spanning 146 language pairs, in their 'Machine Translation Meta Evaluation through Translation Accuracy Challenge Sets'.

Read: direct.mit.edu/coli/article...

Congratulations to Alessia Battisti, who successfully defended her PhD thesis on the "Analysis and assessment of continuous Swiss German Sign Language production of adult learners". Special thanks to the external examiner Johanna Mesch.

I had the pleasure of presenting our paper “20min-XD: A Comparable Corpus of Swiss News Articles (arxiv.org/abs/2504.21677) ”, a joint work with @vamvas.bsky.social , Selena Calleri and @ricosennrich.bsky.social , at SwissText 2025 last week.

We are honored to receive Best Paper Award for it! ✨

Michelle Wastl at the SwissNLP Expo

Our Michelle Wastl is demonstrating her invention, the Translation Direction Detector, at the SwissNLP Expo!
Michelle's paper: arxiv.org/abs/2401.06769
Demo: huggingface.co/spaces/Zuric...
If you're at the expo, make sure to stop by the Department of Computational Linguistics UZH!

It’s finally official: the long-awaited Tokenization Workshop is here!

Congratulations to Dr. @shaitarova.bsky.social , who just successfully defended her thesis on "Generated Text as the Locus of Language Contact: Exploring the Impact of Generative AI on English and German". Special thanks to the external examiner Natalia Resende!

UZH: Postdoc in Computational Linguistics Come work with me! I am inviting applications for a postdoc-position in the field of Computational/Historical/English Linguistics as part of a Swiss National Science Fund (SNSF)-funded project on 'Who...

Please repost - the position is part of an SNF-funded project (equivalent of an ERC starting grant)
jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie...

Massive congrats to @nadavb.bsky.social for passing his PhD defence yesterday! 👏👏👏
Thanks to Anders Søgaard, @radamihalcea.bsky.social @ricosennrich.bsky.social for serving as examiners.
You can find his thesis here, which the committee characterised as "a joy to read": arxiv.org/abs/2503.07395

I'm thrilled to share my first PhD project, a joint work with
@vamvas.bsky.social and @ricosennrich.bsky.social
Paper link:
arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10494
Long context LLMs have paved the way for document translation, but is simply inputting the whole content the optimal way?
Here's the thread 🧵 [1/n]

Congratulations to Jason Armitage, who just successfully defended his PhD thesis on "Embodied AI in Virtual Environments with Alignment of Visual and Linguistic Inputs." Special thanks to the external examiner Sina Zarrieß!

Happening now: @marinecarpuat.bsky.social giving a talk on "Human-Centered NLP for Cross-Lingual Communication".

Junior Professorship (W1, non tenured) in Computational Social Science Deadline: 7th of January 2025

We @unikonstanz.bsky.social are hiring a junior professor in computational social science with a specialization in text-as-data methods and LLMs. Please share and contact me if you are interested!

stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/2...

Tannon Kew presenting during his viva.

Congratulations to Dr. @tannonk.bsky.social, who just successfully defended his thesis on "Leveraging Data, Decoding, and Context for Controlling Text Generation from Pretrained Language Models". Special thanks to the external examiner @feralvam.bsky.social!