Institut für Computerlinguistik

I'm a postdoctoral researcher interested in machine translation, unreasonably effective neural networks, phonetics and acoustics, markup technologies. Also, I find teaching super exciting!

I am working with Sarah Ebling, Annette Rios and others on automatic sign language translation. I am part of a large EU project called EASIER.

Currently I am most interested in the following:

• Scientific integrity, reproducibility, evaluation protocols, signifiance testing
• Translating sign languages
• Teaching NMT
• Novel decoding algorithms for NMT
• Robustness of NMT systems

Planning a programming project or thesis related to the topics mentioned above? Come talk to me, I'd love to hear about it.

(Things I used to do.)

• 11/2021: Invited talk at the NLP Meetup Zurich, topic: A Casual Q&A Session on Machine Translation.
• 10/2021: Invited lecture at the University of Berne, Switzerland, on recurrent neural networks. Recording.
• 10/2021: Invited talk in the SIGTYP lecture series, Exploring a Sampling-based Alternative to Beam Search. More info and recording.
• 08/2021: A paper on a dataset and efficient baselines for summarization in German was accepted to the NewSum workshop of EMNLP 2021.
• 08/2021: Gave a keynote talk at LoResMT, a workshop of MT Summit, On Meaningful Evaluation of Machine Translation Systems.
• 05/2021: A paper by myself and Rico Sennrich on the biases and robustness of Minimum Bayes Risk decoding was accepted to ACL 2021!
• 04/2021: A new paper on the applicability of pose estimation for sign language recognition is accepted to the ChaLearn workshop of CVPR 2021. Recording
• 04/2021: Our paper on the quality of web-crawled multilingual corpora will be presented at the AfricaNLP Workshop of EACL 2021. Find a preprint here.
• 03/2021: Gave a talk at NLPWithFriends about scientific progress in machine translation, more info and recording.
• 12/2020: Check out a new series of blog posts about MT evaluation. All feedback is welcome!
• 10/2020: Our paper on improving zero-shot NMT is accepted to WMT.
• 10/2020: Our paper on "Domain Robustness in NMT" is accepted to AMTA.
• 08/2020: Finished my degree in "Hochschuldidaktik" recently, a two-year program for people who'd like to take teaching seriously. More info.
• 07/2020: I recently started a Youtube playlist where I explain sequence generation decoding algorithms such as beam search.
• 02/2020: Gave two (!) talks in a row in our kolloquium, on zero-shot translation and noisy parallel data. Slides.
• 01/2020: Wrote an all-new tutorial on multilingual neural machine translation with Sockeye. For feedback or comments please email me!
• 12/2019: An interview with Slator resulted in an article discussing the prospects of BLEU.
• 10/2019: Gave a "no-nonsense" talk about MT research at the fifth MT meetup in Zurich.
• 07/2019: I was co-author of the WMT 19 findings paper.

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