✨New paper✨ We find script (e.g. Cyrillic, Latin) to be a linear direction in the activation space of Whisper, enabling transliteration at test-time by adding such script directions to the activations — producing e.g. Cyrillic Japanese transcriptions.

VarDial 2026 will be colocated with @eaclmeeting.bsky.social! We're looking forward to your papers on NLP for similar languages, varieties and dialects :) Deadline: Dec 19 (Jan 2 for pre-reviewed ARR papers) sites.google.com/view/vardial...

Group photo at NeurIPS 2025 San Diego

Congrats to Pingjun, @beiduo.bsky.social , Siyao, Marie, and @barbaraplank.bsky.social for receiving the SAC Highlights reward!

Congrats to our team member Diego Frassinelli on the SAC Highlights award!

At #Interspeech2025 I'm going to present Betthupferl, a dataset for German dialect ASR & dialect-to-standard speech translation! We analyze differences between dialectal & Standard German transcriptions, benchmark ASR models, and examine shortcomings of current ASR models & evaluation metrics.

UPDATE: Our poster presentation got moved to Tuesday, 16:00–17:30 (session 10)! #ACL2025NLP

Unsure which presentations to attend at #ACL2025? 🛎️🗣️

Headed to ACL? MaiNLP & our most recent work will be there too👥📄 Come see what we’ve been working on!

📄 [ACL 2025 main] Circuit compositions: Exploring Modular Structures in Transformer-Based Language Models (doi.org/10.48550/arX...)

📄 [ACL 2025 main] LLMs instead of Human Judges? A Large Scale Empirical Study across 20 NLP Evaluation Tasks (doi.org/10.48550/arX...)

At #ACL2025NLP I'll present our analysis of the effect of linguistic similarity on cross-lingual transfer! We looked at how 10 similarity measures correlate w/ transfer results btwn 263 languages across 3 NLP tasks. Different similarity measures matter for diff. experiments (no one-size-fits-all)!

🤔 Can LLMs read between the lines? Our another #ACL2025 paper surveys resources on how LLMs handle pragmatics like implicatures, deixis, and more. We map out a new landscape for both LLMs and linguistics in pragmatic research. 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2502.12378 🧠💬 #LLMs #Pragmatics

🚨 Can LLMs generate explanations that are as useful as human ones for modeling label distributions in NLI?🌹"A Rose by Any Other Name" shows that they can 💬 We explore scalable, explanation-based annotation via LLMs. 📍Come find us in Vienna 🇦🇹! (July 28, 18:00-19:30, Hall 4/5) #ACL2025NLP #acl2025

🎉 Our paper “Algorithmic Fidelity of LLMs in Generating Synthetic German Public Opinions” is accepted at #ACL2025 main conference as an oral presentation! 🇩🇪🤖 We study how well LLMs simulate real survey responses using open-ended German data, showing the left-leaning bias.

The future of AI literacy starts early! Our very own @fkoerner.bsky.social recently led a series of hands-on workshops teaching some of our youngest students yet 🌱🤖

Looking forward to my visit to Hamburg University and their Data Science group!

What changes if you take the LLM prompt “Tell me a short story about Dr. Li” and replace “Dr. Li” with “Dr. Smith”? Would you have guessed that this introduces a massive gender bias, from ca. half/half to 99% male doctors? 

In our #ACL2025 paper we present the Spotlight framework which...

🦙 how well do LLMs encode discourse knowledge? does that generalize across languages? 🛎️ in our #ACL2025 paper, we uncover fascinating trends about multilingual discourse representations! joint work w/ @florian-eichin.com @barbaraplank.bsky.social @mhedderich.bsky.social 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2503.10515

Caught some great moments at #MCML Munich AI Day 2025 last week📍 From sharp keynotes to poster debates. Our team had the chance to show some recent work, join the conversations, and bring back plenty of food for thought🧠🗣️📊

Thanks for the invitation to the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) to give this year's Hermann-Paul-Center Lecture lnkd.in/d_wUeDfY I enjoyed the visit, the great audience, and the stay in this lovely city. Thank you #blackforest #freiburg #breisgau

My ACL 2024 keynote talk on "Are LLMs Narrowing Our Horizon? Let’s Embrace Variation in NLP!" is online now: underline.io/events/466/s... 2024.aclweb.org/program/keyn... It was a huge honor to me to give last year's flagship-in-NLP-conference keynote in Bangkok 🇹🇭

Dei Boarisch heard ned bei "Servus" und "Pfiade" auf? Dann suach ma genau Di! Wir suachan Bairischsprecher:innen, de a kurze Umfrage über KI-generierds Boarisch für a Masterarbeit beantwortn mechadn. Mid jeder Teilnahme bring ma den boarischn Dialekt a Stickal weida in de digitale Weyd!

Do you speak Bavarian? Then please consider helping in a thesis research project👇

Want to know if your prompting is also affected by this? Addressing this and other issues systematically, we proposed Spotlight, which utilizes data mining to uncover the effects of prompt- and model-changes (meet us at ACL to discuss) arxiv.org/abs/2504.15815

Bavarian dialect speakers needed! Our MSc student Miriam wants to find out 1. how good/bad LLM-generated "Bavarian" is, and 2. whether dialect speakers agree with each other on this. The survey takes <5 min: survey.ifkw.lmu.de/dialquali25/ Thank you for sharing/participating!

Proposing "kilometers cycled in 2 weeks" as a new success metric for research groups 🚴‍♀️📊🥇 @mainlp.bsky.social #stadtradeln

Researchers from Georgetown University, LMU Munich, Abo Akademi, and Indiana University present “eRST: A Signaled Graph Theory of Discourse Relations and Organization”. Read: direct.mit.edu/coli/article...

LeWiDi: Shared task on Learning With Disagreement Website: le-wi-di.github.io We'd like to invite researchers in disagreement & variation to participate in the third edition of the LeWidi shared tasks held in conjunction with the NLPerspectives workshop at EMNLP 2025 nlperspectives.di.unito.it

🛎️ Excited to announce the 1st Workshop on Bridging NLP and Public Opinion Research at COLM 2025, Oct 10th in Montreal 🇨🇦 As LLMs reshape public discourse and research, collaboration between NLP and Public Opinion Research (POR) is more vital than ever #NLPOR Submit by June 23📄 🔗 tinyurl.com/nlpor25

Are you working with LLMs and survey data or generally care about high-quality data and reliable evaluation? Then this might be for you! Very excited to share the news about our upcoming COLM 2025 workshop #NLPOR Thanks for helping spread the word ☺️

🗨️ Beyond “noisy” text: How (and why) to process dialect data 🔎 Keynote talk at WNUT @ NAACL 👥 @verenablaschke.bsky.social 📁 Workshop on noisy and user-generated text (May 3) The full workshop programme is here: noisy-text.github.io/2025/ bsky.app/profile/vere...

On my way to #NAACL2025 where I'll give a keynote at the noisy text workshop (WNUT), presenting some of the challenges & methods for dialect NLP + also discussing dialect speakers' perspectives! 🗨️ Beyond “noisy” text: How (and why) to process dialect data 🗓️ Saturday, May 3, 9:30–10:30

Reunion in Singapore!🇸🇬 @barbaraplank.bsky.social, @xinpeng.bsky.social, who's currently on a research stay at NYU, and Chengzhi are presenting their work at @iclr-conf.bsky.social

💬 Find us today at Poster Session 1, happening this morning right after the keynote talk (poster #531) @xinpeng.bsky.social

Party time! 🛎️🎉 We had a cozy barbecue by the Isar river to celebrate MaiNLP’s 3rd anniversary — here are some impressions! 🎂

Are you attending NAACL 2025 and are you interested in low-resource languages and dialects? Then don't miss our very own @verenablaschke.bsky.social's keynote talk at the WNUT 2025 workshop on May 3rd: Beyond “noisy” text: How (and why) to process dialect data 🌐 ☀️ noisy-text.github.io/2025/

Upcoming ICLR 2025 paper: ✂️ Surgical, Cheap, and Flexible: Mitigating False Refusal in Language Models via Single Vector Ablation We propose a surgical & flexible approach to mitigate false refusal in LLMs with minimal effect on performance and inference cost led by @xinpeng.bsky.social (1/2)

Celebration day 🎉- it all started exactly 3 years ago in Munich, on a very empty corridor... with snow in the April weekend 🚴🏔️🏄🥨🌤️ Happy and grateful for all the amazing people who are/were/will be part of the MaiNLP @mainlp.bsky.social @cislmu.bsky.social @lmumuenchen.bsky.social journey☀️

Happy to be part of that team for almost 1/3 of that time 😀

🎉MaiNLP is turning 3 today!🎂🥳 We’ve grown a lot since @barbaraplank.bsky.social started this group with nothing but three aspiring researches and a hand-drawn sign on the door. Huge thanks to all the amazing people who have joined or visited us since. Here’s to many more years of exciting research!🚀

💻 New Code and Models for Career Path Prediction! I'm excited to share that I've added the code and fine-tuned models from our KARRIEREWEGE paper to GitHub and Hugging Face! A collaboration with @barbaraplank.bsky.social, Rob van der Goot, and Yuri Campbell.

Professor Barbara Plank (@barbaraplank.bsky.social) will deliver Keynote Presentation during FedCSIS 2025; presentation title to be announced soon. 2025.fedcsis.org/keynotes/bar...

Great theme-track at EMNLP: Interdisciplinary Recontextualization of NLP - "The goal is to increase our awareness of how advances in NLP can impact other fields, and design better strategies to measure that impact both within and across disciplines."

MaiNLP team at COLING 2025 @mainlp.bsky.social

Great talk on Human-Centered NLP for Cross-Lingual Communication by @marinecarpuat.bsky.social at @mainlp.bsky.social with so many good points: centering usefulness of MT for users, nuanced differences in translation and how to make them explicit, in broad: rethinking MT. Thank you for the visit! ☀️

Yesterday @haldaume3.bsky.social visited us at LMU Munich! Wonderful talk in the afternoon @mainlp.bsky.social and fireside chat at the grand AI-hub opening in the evening! Great having you here, Hal, thanks for the visit

Hello on the new sky!