Computational Linguistics @ UZH

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.

Congratulations to Ann-Sophie Gnehm, who just passed the viva of her PhD on "Bridging the Gap between Job Ad Texts and Labor Market Ontologies with Adaptation and Contextualization Techniques". With many thanks to the external examiners @dirkhovy.bsky.social and Einat Minkov.

UZH group picture at #EMNLP2025!

If you're here, catch us for a chat!

🎉 Terminology Shared Task @WMT25: Paper Out 🎉
Highlights:
- sentence translation seems solvable, document translation is still challenging
- better systems benefit more from proper terminologies
- term-based metrics correlate poorly with general translation quality

www2.statmt.org/wmt25/pdf/20...

What Does and What Should AI Know? Mittwoch, 12. November 2025 | DSI Event Room (SOC E-010)

Upcoming panel discussion on Nov 12 moderated by our @tevuko.bsky.social: What Does and What Should AI Know?

More info and registration link: www.ema.uzh.ch/de/register/...

📢 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

A memorial service, followed by a reception, will take place on Friday, 14 November at 5:00 PM in the Aula (KOL-G-201) of the main building of the University of Zurich (Rämistrasse 71, 8006 Zurich).

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/...

On September 11, 2025, our department will hold a Welcome Day for new students. Don't miss this opportunity to get to know your new university, study program, and fellow students! Find out more:
www.cl.uzh.ch/en/studies/s...

We are proud to announce that Lena Jäger, Head of Digital Linguistics at our department, has also been appointed as a professor in the Department of Informatics. Congratulations!
Find out more about her interdisciplinary work: www.ifi.uzh.ch/en/news/lena...

🚨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: 🧵

Congratulations to our PhD student, Cui Ding, and Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox, Giovanni Acampa, Tiago Pimentel, Alex Warstadt, Tamar I. Regevon on winning a SAC highlight award at #ACL2025! 👏
2025.aclweb.org/program/awar...

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...

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!

Attending ACL 2025? Looking for a new multimodal modeling challenge? Interested in cognitive modeling and NLP for science? Excited about human centered applications of NLP?
Join our tutorial on Eye Tracking and NLP!!
🗓️ Sunday July 27, 2025, 09:00 - 12:30, Hall M.
#ACL2025 #NLP #EyeTracking

Listeners are biased towards voices of young speakers and female speakers when discriminating voices - Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications In face processing, an own-age recognition advantage has frequently been reported whereby observers are better at recognizing faces of their own compared to other age groups. We wanted to know whether...

Our new paper @cl-uzh.bsky.social shows that when listeners compare voices of young or female speakers, they show a bias toward judging them as the same. This might be relevant for forensic voice experts when comparing such voices: cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10....

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.

Congratulations to Marek Kostrzewa, who just successfully defended his PhD thesis on "Monolingual sentence alignment using deep learning". Special thanks to the external examiner Andreas Fischer!

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!

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...

Excited to share that our group will present 9 papers at this year's ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA) in Tokyo!

We will post summaries of each paper in the coming weeks, but here's a quick sneak peek 👀

Computational Psycholinguistics Meeting 2025 | Universiteit Utrecht Universiteit Utrecht

Correct link: cpl2025.sites.uu.nl

Hello Bluesky world! This is our very first post from the Digital Linguistics (DiLi) team — and we’re kicking things off with exciting news:

🖥️ 🧠 We are pleased to announce that the abstract submission for the first Computational Psycholinguistics Meeting 2025 is now open!

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!