News archive

_{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! 💫}

_{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.}

_{21 - 25 November 2022 Invited participant to Lorentz workshop week “Diverse News Recommenders: from concept to implementation”, where I gave a talk on my own and master student Alessandra Polimeno’s work, and participated in implementing NLP for diversity in news recommendation.}

_{12 August 2022. We (a team of CLTL PhDs) won 🥇 the shared task of the 9th Argument Mining Workshop at COLING 2022. We combined inter-task-training on NLI, contrastive learning, & prompting for Argument Novelty and Validity prediction. Our paper was also published in the Proceedings.}

_{24 November 2022 Gave a talk at the Open Science Coffee Leiden on Preregistration in NLP. I shared some of my own recent experiences and discussed preregistration with researchers from other disciplines.}

_{18 October 2022 Invited for a talk at the VU Network Institute Lunch Talk on my recently funded interdisciplinary project “Argument Mining to Analyze Reasons for online (Dis)Trust in Sustainable Initiatives”.}

_{Sept/Oct 2022 Teaching: taught the course Research Seminar on Argument Mining in the ReMa Human Language Technology at the Free University of Amsterdam, and gave a guest lecture on stance detection in the Text Mining course (part of the MSc Computer Science) at Leiden University.}

_{12 August 2022. We (a team of CLTL PhDs) won 🥇 the shared task of the 9th Argument Mining Workshop at COLING 2022. We combined inter-task-training on NLI, contrastive learning, & prompting for Argument Novelty and Validity prediction. Our paper was also published in the Proceedings.}

_{8 - 19 August 2022. Attended the ESSLLI summer school in Galway, Ireland in the summer of 2022, where I followed courses on Argument Mining, Language Resource Development, and Vector-Based Semantics.}

_{1 July 2022. Gave an invited talk at the MilaNLP Lab at Bocconi University (Milan), where I talked about my interdisciplinary research of the past two years into viewpoint diversity in news recommendation. It was a lot of fun, with a great follow-up discussion! See my slides here.}

_{May 2022 Gave an interview to the Dutch computer magazine Computer Idee, about my problems with the credit scoring algorithm of the National Railway (NS) and also my research project on diversity in news recommendation.}

_{17 June 2022. Presented the poster “Beyond Gun Control: Creating a Dutch Stance Dataset for Diversity in News Recommendation” from my abstract on current work on a Dutch Political Stance dataset (shared work with Social Science colleagues at the VU, among them Kasper Welbers) at Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands (CLIN32).}

_{June 2022. Followed the SIKS “Responsible AI” course, which had a roleplaying game where we pretended to be different stakeholders for AI used for automatic resume scanning in hiring, after an ableist hiring incident. My role: the HR department. :-)}

_{13 June 2022. Received small grant (with dr. Ana Lopes from the Department of Social Science @ VU) for our interdisciplinary project “Reasons for online (dis)trust in sustainable initiatives” - financed by the Interdisciplinarity in the Digital Society VU grant. –>}

_{18 Feb 2022. Presented this poster - of my previously published paper on NLP in news rec - at the Network Institute’s event on interdisciplinarity in the Digital Society. Paper was joint work with the project group Rethinking News Algorithms. Also, I networked at this network event! :-)}

_{17 Feb 2022. Participated in the CCS.Amsterdam Workshop on Code Quality.}

_{18 Jan 2022. Interview in Dutch national newspaper Trouw about my problems with a credit check algorithm of the Dutch National Railway company (NS) - a topic related to ethics in data science/AI and thus something I care deeply about.}

_{17 Jan 2022. Published a book summary and review of the book “Linguistics for the Age of AI” in the LINGUIST List. My conclusion: Interesting, but may miss info for its intended audience(s).}

_{10 Nov 2021. Presented my paper “Is Stance Detection Topic-Independent and Cross-topic Generalizable? – A Reproduction Study”, a systematic and careful reproduction and assessment of cross-topic stance detection, at the Argument Mining Workshop at EMNLP, on-site in the Dominican Republic!}

_{4 Nov 2021. Participated in an excellent workshop on supervising students by the Forum of Young Scientists - and learned a lot about supervision and communication in supervision!}

_{2 Nov 2021. Spoke about my MA thesis work on weak supervision for smoking status detection at the 2nd Dutch meeting on Clinical NLP at Radboud University, Nijmegen.}

_{29 Oct 2021 Our project team on diversity in news recommendation organized a workshop for stakeholders (News organizations and policy makers) at the University of Amsterdam..}

_{27 Sept 2021 - 1 Oct 2021. On-Site Student Volunteer at RecSys2021, a hybrid conference in Amsterdam. I made new connections, saw some collaborators in 3D for the first time, and often tweeted relevant or interesting talks.}

_{16 Sept 2021. Published my first blog post, about my one-year anniversary as a PhD Candidate and 5 things I learned in my first year!}

_{25 Aug, 2021. Participated in the Summer Seminar on Research Integrity organized by the Netherlands Research Integrity Network. Live-tweeted.}

_{5 Aug, 2021. Presented our project agenda paper at the workshop on NLP for Positive Impact, co-located at ACL-IJCNLP 2021 (Online)}

_{9 July, 2021. Presented two talks at CLIN31 (Online) (Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands): an oral talk on my ReMA thesis on smoking status in clinical files and one poster on “Viewpoints in the news: claim detection for diverse news recommendation.”}