Preparations going well!

Oh, and don't forget to register! ▶️ clin35.ccl.kuleuven.be/registration Hope to see you at CLIN in Leuven!

I'd like to grow my network more on this site as it is small compared to on that other site. My interests are quite broad so drop some names to follow 👇 around these topics: #machinetranslation #MT, Universal Dependencies, #LLMs in all of its aspects (technical, ethical, data), #Dutch NLP, #OSS!

🥳 Happy to open up the registrations for the CLIN conference! You can find more information here: clin35.ccl.kuleuven.be/registration The website has also been updated with more information for the presenters, with a programme, and with information about the venue. See you soon at #CLIN35!

🥳 We've sent out the notification of acceptance to all abstract submitters! Registration to CLIN will be opened up soon. We're really looking forward to seeing so many of you in Leuven on September 12th!!

As a wrap-up for this year's CTT edition, we invite you to take a peek at our workshop's draft proceedings, in which you'll find the full papers of our wonderful speakers. The final version will be published ont he ACL Anthology, but in the meantime: ctt2025.ccl.kuleuven.be/proceedings

I could not be there this year and mostly worked behind the scenes, but I am very happy to see the workshop growing! Hope everyone had a nice time!!

#CTT2025 is now live at MT Summit 2025!

EleutherAI is trying to build bridges with libraries and other cultural heritage institutions, but I would also love to talk with digital humanities students or researchers about how we can collaborate in mutually beneficial ways.

Yay, so happy to host CLIN in Leuven this year! It'll take place on September 12th. Abstract submission deadline on June 13th!

📢 Introducing the Common Crawl Creative Commons Corpus (C5)! An effort to filter @commoncrawl.bsky.social web-crawls to only documents that are @creativecommons.bsky.social licensed. At this stage 150 billion tokens have been collected - more to come! More info here: huggingface.co/posts/BramVa...

💡 We extend the submission deadline for AT4SSL! If you were working on a submission but didn't manage to finish it we can now offer a few days more so you can still submit it. The new deadline is ⏰ Thursday 20/3 AOE ⏰. All information at sites.google.com/tilburgunive.... @mtsummit2025.bsky.social

Due to underlying dependency nightmares on `evaluate`, MATEO could not be installed anymore and was broken on @hf.co. I took the "opportunity" to update all dependencies. This should lead to higher efficiency and more stability. huggingface.co/spaces/BramV... #MT #MTEval #NMT

Isn't GRPO perfect for finetuning #LLM models for #MT? Specify separate reward functions for ChrF, BLEU, COMET and so on, weigh them, and optimise. Given the broad coverage of the metrics (semantic/syntactic) I'd think it'd work decently?

🤟 Interested in sign language? Friends from VGTC and UGent are working on improving individual Flemish sign recognition with crowd annotation. Turn on your cam, imitate a sign, and contribute to improved sign recognition! A lot of fun and takes 1 min.! woordenboek.vlaamsegebarentaal.be/signbuddy

One thing I'm missing in VS Code that I had at PyCharm: if you break up a long string with Enter to have it formatted nicely, PyCharm would automatically insert necessary quotation marks at start/end of lines. Anything like that for @vscode.dev?

Fun fact: the alphabetically first page on the LATIN @wikipedia.org returned by their API is for "Weird Al" Yankovic la.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Weir...

Sadly r/LocalLLaMA is heavily moderating on the Grok debacle where the system prompt said to exclude critical sources of Elon and Musk. Any post about it is removed, even if it's focused on the issue of centralization and bias in both East and West. Censorship, how ironic.

I guess this group is rarer here than on the other app but people who still buy in on the "Chinese #LLM bad, Western LLM biased, #Grok guud": all models have biases, some are part of the naive train data, some are explicitly imposed. Grok is no exception: www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA...

Op woensdagmiddag 9 april organiseren we in Leiden een workshop over het (automatisch) taalkundig verrijken van historische teksten. Meld je nu aan! ivdnt.org/evenement/ga...

I have the "over-thinking" kind of brain, also in information retrieval aspect. Due to the "9.11 > 9.9" thing for #LLMs my brain knows *something's up with those numbers* so it becomes more uncertain than it should about the trivial math comparison! Semantic satiation or smth?

A lot of people are still downloading one of my first Llama 2 finetunes for Dutch. Stop it. It's bad! You're probably even better off with Llama 3.1 8B for Dutch than this model. 🫠 Or just use Fietje if you want smaller. huggingface.co/BramVanroy/f...

Tempted to buy the Nvidia dip out of FOMO. Doubtful because the dip tells me how volatile the stock is because large-scale investors are easily influenced. Stock might implode when AMD achieves parity in a few months/years, might not, who knows.

For anyone working with data extraction: after some digging on FineWeb-2 and talks with @gui_penedo I found that trafilatura, used for extracting content from web pages, is not deduplicating deterministically. May be important for your use case! Issue: github.com/adbar/trafil...

This thread of friendly and to the point interaction in the Dutch #NLP #LLM community is what makes it so much fun. Super glad to be a part of it github.com/ScandEval/Sc... cc @wietsedv.nl @rijgersberg.bsky.social @saattrupdan.com

It's happening, 2nd edition of #CTT2025 is happening! Are you working on using/building/testing language technology such as #NMT and #LLMs for creative #translation workflows such as #localization, #marketing, proze and poetry, or something else? Join us at our workshop, and follow the new account!!

🚨Call for papers: "Second Workshop on Creative-text Translation and Technology", co-located with the MT Summit 2025 👇 ctt2025.ccl.kuleuven.be/calls Follow us for updates: @ctt2025.bsky.social Organized with @bramvanroy.bsky.social @anaguerberof.bsky.social Lieve Macken, Damien Hansen & Paola Ruffo

Gave a great lecture for our Master students on running ollama. This time we focused on running Dutch models, such as GEITje and Fietje. Find it @ github.com/MichielBonte... Thanks @bramvanroy.bsky.social for the quantized models! #AI-education

Does anyone have a script lying around to measure #LLM model throughput during inference (tokens/s)?

Announcing 🥂 FineWeb2: A sparkling update with 1000s of 🗣️languages. We applied the same data-driven approach that led to SOTA English performance in🍷 FineWeb to thousands of languages. 🥂 FineWeb2 has 8TB of compressed text data and outperforms other datasets.

⏰ In the spirit of "better late than never", I have finally written a paper of GEITje 7B Ultra, a conversational #LLM for #Dutch. 🐐🤖 (So if you're working on your CLIN paper and use the model or data, don't forget to cite it 👀) huggingface.co/posts/BramVa...

Announcing Global-MMLU - an improved MMLU Open dataset with evaluation coverage across 42 languages. The result of months of work with the goal of advancing Multilingual LLM evaluation. Built together with the community and amazing collaborators at Cohere4AI, MILA, MIT, and many more.

Important: if you are working with #Dutch #LLMs and looking to evaluate them: there are different sets of squad-nl going around. As far as I can see there's one from Yeb Havinga (huggingface.co/datasets/yha...), which is used in ScandEval, and a version by @wietsedv.nl which is used in DUMB!