I am a linguist, interested both in theoretical linguistics and in natural language processing. I am currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen, Center for Language and Cognition (CLCG), Computational Linguistics Group.

Before, I was an NLP / ML engineer at Bookarang, Amsterdam. Prior to that, I worked at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, leading my NWO VENI project called Number Words. In 2013-2016, I was a postdoc at the Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, working on cross-linguistic variation in morphosyntax of numerals. My dissertation entitled The Grammar of Standards [pdf] was written in Utrecht Institute for Linguistics OTS and defended in 2014.

For the students of my ‘Linguistics for Language Technology’ 2023 course: course materials are here!

News

• Preprint of our survey Abzianidze, Lasha, Lisa Bylinina and Denis Paperno ‘Semantics and Deep Learning’ written for Cambridge Elements in Semantics is up on LingBuzz
• Paper detailing our (Lukas Edman’s and mine) approach to the BabyLM challenge is up on ACL Anthology: “Too Much Information: Keeping Training Simple for BabyLMs”
• Paper (with Ekaterina Garmash and Alexey Tikhonov) “Connecting degree and polarity: An artificial language learning study” accepted to EMNLP 2023 main! [preprint]
• Joint work with Alexey Tikhonov and Denis Paperno on multimodal word representations accepted to *SEM 2023 [preprint]
• I joined the CompLing group in Groningen as Assistant Professor! Starting 1 Dec 2022.
• Paper on polarity in multilingual models accepted to CogSci2022: “The driving forces of polarity-sensitivity: Experiments with multilingual pre-trained neural language models”.
• My paper with Alexey Tikhonov has been accepted to ACL 2022 main conference! Here it is: “Transformers in the loop: Polarity in neural models of language”.
• On the 14th June 2022, I presented my recent work at the Computational Linguistics Seminar, ILLC, University of Amsterdam.
• I presented my recent joint work with Alexey Tikhonov on artificial language learning applied to multilingual pre-trained language models at ILFC Seminar (CNRS, Paris) and at the “Jabberwocky Words in Linguistics” workshop (UniBuc & UMass Amherst).
• Two large-scale COVID-related psychology studies I contributed to a bit are ready: one published at Nature Human Behaviour, [one more](https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/n3dyf published by PNAS; yet one more appeared in Affective Science.
• The video of my keynote at Sinn und Bedeutung 25 (Sept 2020) is available online: “Existence and Plurality”.