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 research is about news recommender systems and specifically: diversity in news recommender systems. I use NLP to explore and promote diversity, especially that of different viewpoints, in news recommendation contexts. 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 specifically in Computational Argumentation or Argument Mining. I have extensive knowledge of current developments in NLP, and am extremely curious! My experience ranges from identifying research problems to managing annotation projects, and from exploratory data analysis to training models, including techniques such as few-shot learning and prompting. 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.

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

_{26 March 2024 Gave my introduction talk at GESIS about my research interests, past work, and also my funded research visit project at GESIS! 😃}

_{15 March - 30 May 2024 I will spend 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! 🤩}

_{Feb 2024 My paper “Investigating the Robustness of Modelling Decisions for Few-Shot Cross-Topic Stance Detection: A Preregistered Study” was accepted to LREC-COLING 2024! Preprint coming soon.}

_{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! 💫}

_{19 Sept 2023 Our work “𝘐𝘮𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘌𝘷𝘢𝘭𝘶𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘍𝘳𝘢𝘨𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘯 𝘕𝘦𝘸𝘴 𝘙𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘭𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘕𝘦𝘸𝘴 𝘚𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘴” is accepted at NORMalize 2023, co-located with RecSys 2023! 🎉 This work, a summary here, is based on first-author Alessandra Polimeno’s excellent master thesis work, supervised by me and co-authors Sanne Vrijenhoek and Antske Fokkens. I will present it on Sept 19 in the NORMalize workshop.}

_{12 June - 1 Sept 2023 “Computational Linguist & AI” summer intern in the “Content & Creator AI Linguist” team at LinkedIn in Dublin, Ireland! 🍀}

_{24 - 30 May 2023 At ICA23: Presented a paper on “Argument Mining to Analyze Reasons for (a Lack of) Trust in Sustainable Initiatives” - written with Ana Isabel Lopes (communication science) and student Alessandra Polimeno (CLTL). Also participated in the pre-conference hackathon with a case on few-shot detection of hypocrisy accusations in online sustainability debates, in an interdisciplinary team of PhDs.}

_{24 Feb 2023 Invited for a short talk, “Cross-topic Stances and How to Find Them (in the News)”, at the University of Groningen, with also talks by fellow Argument Miners from CLTL!}

_{6 to 8 Feb 2023 Participated in the 2023 HPLT winter school on Large-Scale Language Modeling in Norway, and wrote a blog post about my personal highlights.}

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