Hello world! ⚡ I am Myrthe Reuver, a PhD candidate at the Computational Linguistics and Text Mining Lab (CLTL) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU). My PhD is about using natural language processing (NLP) to explore and promote responsible news recommender systems. I’m supervised by prof. dr. Antske Fokkens (also connected to CLTL) and prof. dr. Suzan Verberne (connected to the Text Mining group at LIACS, Leiden University).

My specialization is in Computational Argumentation or Argument Mining to detect different arguments and viewpoints in the news. My research is mostly related to arguments, ethical and responsible use of NLP, and interdisciplinary research - mostly combining social science with NLP. I am especially interested in careful evaluation: Are we measuring what we think we are measuring? 🤔 I also enjoy presenting research outcomes to different audiences - whether in talks, papers, or reports.

During my PhD, I have completed a fully funded research visit through the GESIS Visiting Junior Researcher grant at the Data Science Methods group at GESIS in Cologne (March - May 2024) and have succesfully completed an internship in the Content & Creator AI Linguist team at LinkedIn in Dublin, Ireland (Summer 2023). I have also given invited talks at several international research labs and institutes, including MilaNLP Lab @ Bocconi University, FBK in Trento, and IMS @ Stuttgart University.

Before my PhD, I completed the Research Master’s programme “Linguistics and Communication Sciences” (cum laude + with Honours) at Radboud University in Nijmegen and the MSc programme “Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence” (with distinction) at Tilburg University in Tilburg. I also was a proud co-founder and editor-in-chief of Radboud’s student linguistics journal RU:ts, and enjoy teaching: I was TA on Information Science during my MA and have taught ‘Programming in Python’ as well as a research seminar on Argument Mining during my PhD. You can download my full CV here.

I hope to continue doing interesting research with societal impact, where my interests are (but are not limited to):
-online information, argumentation, and debate;
-societally responsible AI;
-meta-science: scientific norms and methodology within and outside NLP;
-and interdisciplinarity!

Want to know more about any of my current or past projects? Ask me through email, LinkedIn, or Twitter. I’m always interested in new ideas or opportunities, so please contact me if you have any! 😁

News

_{23 Sept 2024 The NWO project “Rethinking News Algorithms”, which my PhD is part of, organized a final PhD workshop to bridge the gap between academic research and practical implementation for responsible, diverse news recommendation. The final part of the afternoon was fun as well as insightful: I led an interactive “Responsible AI” role-playing game! 🕹️ Read more in my summary of the afternoon.}

_{13 Sept 2024 Had a great time at the Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Political Text Analysis (CPSS) at the KONVENS conference in Vienna, where I contributed to two papers! One paper, “A Few Hypocrites: Few-Shot Learning and Subtype Definitions for Detecting Hypocrisy Accusations in Online Climate Change Debates”, was co-authored with a group of PhD students I met at the ICA23 hackathon in Toronto! The other paper, “Topic-specific Social Science Theory in Stance Detection: a Proposal and Interdisciplinary Pilot Study on Sustainability Initiatives”, was a long-due paper from a collaboration with Ana Isabel Lopez from the communication science department. I also wrote a brief summary of both papers and my experience at the conference.}

_{15 August 2024 The first result of my GESIS research visit is published! With first author Maximilian Maurer, Julia Romberg, Negash Weldekiros, and Gabriella Lapesa we worked on a complex shared task on 𝐝𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐨-𝐜𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐚𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐮𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐯𝐚𝐥. Our solution placed third 🥉 in this shared task (part of the Argument Mining workshop) at ACL 2024. Read our paper or my short summary of the paper and task - it really connected well to many of my interests: diversity in recommendation and retrieval, argument mining, and socio-cultural context of NLP!}

_{20-25 May, 2024 Presented a poster of our paper “Investigating the Robustness of Modelling Decisions for Few-Shot Cross-Topic Stance Detection: A Preregistered Study” (with Suzan Verberne and Antske Fokkens) at LREC-COLING 2024 in Turin, Italy! Also wrote a short post of highlights and reflection on the conference!}

_{17 May 2024 Gave an invited talk: “Connecting islands: aligning NLP with social science in research questions, tasks, and evaluation” at the Digital Humanities research group at research institute Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento, Italy. Slides}

_{6 May 2024 Presented work-in-progress (with co-authors Paulina Garcia-Corral, Avishai Green, Hendrik Meyer, Xiaoyue Yan, and Anke Stoll) about hypocrisy accusations in climate debates (talk slides) at CompText, the conference on computational text analysis for and by social scientists, at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Also wrote a short post of my highlights and reflection of the conference.}

_{15 March - 30 May 2024 I spent the spring semester as a Visiting Junior Researcher in the Computational Social Science department at GESIS in Cologne! I won a grant to work with professor Gabriella Lapesa, and I will research instruction-tuned models and their evaluation challenges for social science research. Exciting! 🤩 Gave my introduction talk on March 26.}

_{4 December 2023 Gave an invited talk on my PhD research so far: “Democratically healthy news recommendation: aligning NLP with society, theory, and evaluation”, at the IMS Institute at the University of Stuttgart.}

_{1 November 2023 Gave a Guest lecture about my research on stance detection, diversity in news recommendation, and evaluation in the course “Text Mining” in the MSc Computer Science at Leiden University.}

_{25 Oct 2023 Participated in the informal “Digital Society” symposium at Utrecht University, where several PhDs doing work on interdisciplinary NLP with arguments, viewpoints, and deliberation presented their current in-progress work, including Michiel van der Meer, Cedric Waterschoot, Anna Wegmann, Liesje van der Linden and Charlotte Vaassen. This was a lot of fun!}

_{5 Oct 2023 Guest on the LinkedIn Women in Tech podcast episode about tech internships and my summer internship this year, with my LinkedIn mentor Isabell Seeger. Content: why I wanted to do an internship, how I experienced the planning and applying for it, as well as the internship itself! 💫}

_{–> news archive has earlier talks, events, etc.}