Friday 23 January 2026 - 11am Speaker: Malvina Nissim (University of Groningen)Title: The Mid-life of a Computational LinguistAbstract: Almost exactly twenty years after my last official working day in Edinburgh as a postdoc, I am back for a two-month research stay, visiting from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.In this introductory talk at the start of my visit, I will give a bird’s-eye view of some of my recent and ongoing work. This includes probing LLMs for language games and other challenges, inference-time scaling strategies for reasoning tasks, and personalisation in dialogue and machine translation. I will also briefly talk about my experience with outreach activities, which I greatly enjoy, and how I integrate them into my teaching (I will bring something along that people can play with!). I will close with a few broader reflections on the state of our field (thoughts I have mostly been debating with myself) which I would be very happy to discuss with anyone interested during my stay.Biography: Malvina Nissim (https://malvinanissim.github.io) is full professor of Computational Linguistics & Society at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, where she is a member of the GroNLP (Groningen Natural Language Processing) group. Before settling in Groningen over 10 years ago, she lived, studied, and worked in Italy (where she grew up), Scotland, and Germany. She works on multiple aspects of Natural Language Processing, with particular attention to language itself and the interaction of Language Technology and society. Relatedly, she is the coordinator of the Sectorplan‘s theme Humane AI at the University of Groningen, and is a member of the ACL Ethics Committee. As a complement to her research activities she is keen to engage in science communication and outreach, including to school children, especially towards an aware and responsible use of language technologies. She very much enjoys public speaking, and she was lucky to get the chance to give a TEDx talk and to be invited by the European Council to give a plenary lecture on gender bias in Artificial Intelligence on International Women’s Day 2021. As a university professor she teaches quite a bit and was elected as the 2016 University of Groningen Lecturer of the Year. Malvina is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Jantina Tammes School for Digital Society, Technology, and AI at the University of Groningen, and a member of the board of AILC, the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics. To survive a full time job she loves to run near the water, to knit, and to spend time with her two teenagers. Jan 23 2026 11.00 - 12.00 Friday 23 January 2026 - 11am Speaker: Malvina Nissim (University of Groningen) IF, G.03
Friday 23 January 2026 - 11am Speaker: Malvina Nissim (University of Groningen)Title: The Mid-life of a Computational LinguistAbstract: Almost exactly twenty years after my last official working day in Edinburgh as a postdoc, I am back for a two-month research stay, visiting from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.In this introductory talk at the start of my visit, I will give a bird’s-eye view of some of my recent and ongoing work. This includes probing LLMs for language games and other challenges, inference-time scaling strategies for reasoning tasks, and personalisation in dialogue and machine translation. I will also briefly talk about my experience with outreach activities, which I greatly enjoy, and how I integrate them into my teaching (I will bring something along that people can play with!). I will close with a few broader reflections on the state of our field (thoughts I have mostly been debating with myself) which I would be very happy to discuss with anyone interested during my stay.Biography: Malvina Nissim (https://malvinanissim.github.io) is full professor of Computational Linguistics & Society at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, where she is a member of the GroNLP (Groningen Natural Language Processing) group. Before settling in Groningen over 10 years ago, she lived, studied, and worked in Italy (where she grew up), Scotland, and Germany. She works on multiple aspects of Natural Language Processing, with particular attention to language itself and the interaction of Language Technology and society. Relatedly, she is the coordinator of the Sectorplan‘s theme Humane AI at the University of Groningen, and is a member of the ACL Ethics Committee. As a complement to her research activities she is keen to engage in science communication and outreach, including to school children, especially towards an aware and responsible use of language technologies. She very much enjoys public speaking, and she was lucky to get the chance to give a TEDx talk and to be invited by the European Council to give a plenary lecture on gender bias in Artificial Intelligence on International Women’s Day 2021. As a university professor she teaches quite a bit and was elected as the 2016 University of Groningen Lecturer of the Year. Malvina is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Jantina Tammes School for Digital Society, Technology, and AI at the University of Groningen, and a member of the board of AILC, the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics. To survive a full time job she loves to run near the water, to knit, and to spend time with her two teenagers. Jan 23 2026 11.00 - 12.00 Friday 23 January 2026 - 11am Speaker: Malvina Nissim (University of Groningen) IF, G.03
Jan 23 2026 11.00 - 12.00 Friday 23 January 2026 - 11am Speaker: Malvina Nissim (University of Groningen)
