We are delighted to welcome @marlutz.bsky.social to our lab over the next few months! 🎉
She'll work on the representation of different demographic groups in LLMs.

#NLProc

For today's Reading Group @carolin-holtermann.bsky.social presented "REL-A.I.: An Interaction-Centered Approach To Measuring Human-LM Reliance" by @kaitlynzhou.bsky.social
and colleagues.

Paper: aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-l...

#NLProc

#MemoryModay #NLProc Uma et al. (2020) highlights 'A Case for Soft Loss Functions' efficacy using soft labels & crowd annotations in AI tasks, outshining top-tier methods.

#TBT #NLProc '[MASK]? Making Sense of Language-Specific BERT Models' by @deboranozza.bsky.social, Bianchi & @dirkhovy.bsky.social (2020), explores language-specific vs universal BERT models.

I realized how much DMing is like being a professor/chairing a committee. You:
- make a brilliant plan for 2+ hours of fun
- prep lots of material
- immediately get derailed by questions/arguments/etc.
- keep it together to make the most of the time together
- end up not using most of the material

- Optional: question your life choices but show up to do it again the next week anyway

Hey Siri. Ok Google. Alexa: A topic modeling of user reviews for smart speakers Hanh Nguyen, Dirk Hovy. Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2019). 2019.

#MemoryModay #NLProc 'Hey Siri. Ok Google. Alexa: A topic modeling of user reviews for smart speakers,' by Nguyen & @dirkhovy.bsky.social decodes speaker reviews for user preferences using topic models. Domain knowledge needed for market analysis.

For today’s lab seminar, we had the pleasure of hearing an inspiring talk by Heather Lent on Emerging Ethical Challenges in NLP Research and NLP Security, wherein researchers should strive to uphold the ethical best practices of both NLP and cybersecurity.

#NLProc

We're excited to welcome @pia-p.bsky.social who will be visiting our lab for the upcoming months! She is working on personalizing content moderation beyond sociodemographics.

#NLProc

Identifying Linguistic Areas for Geolocation Tommaso Fornaciari, Dirk Hovy. Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2019). 2019.

#TBT #NLProc Fornaciari, @dirkhovy.bsky.social's 'Identifying Linguistic Areas for Geolocation' explores using social media writing for geolocation via Point-to-City (P2C).

LLMs are reshaping how we process information, now even processing videos for us. In a study with 900+ participants, we found AI boosts efficiency and accuracy, but also drives overreliance.
So the real question: how much of our access to information are we willing to outsource to LLMs?

Wish I could be at @eaclmeeting.bsky.social, but the lab is well represetned. If you are there, come and say hi!

Thinking of applying for an #MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2026?

I’m open to supervising at Bocconi! Feel free to reach out.

By submitting an expression of interest to Bocconi, selected applicants will receive full proposal support.

🗓️ Deadline: April 15
👉 www.unibocconi.it/en/horizon-e...

The Pluralistic Moral Gap
LLMs align with human moral judgments when consensus is high—but fail when opinions diverge, relying on a narrower set of values.
🗓 Wed, Mar 25
📍 Pavillon de Rabat

Do LLMs Adapt to Socioeconomic Language Variation? (#VarDial)
LLMs only weakly adapt to SES differences—and often default to higher-SES styles, sometimes producing caricatures.
🗓 Sun, Mar 29
📍 Poster Hall

Exploring Subjective Tasks in Farsi (#WASSA)
Farsi is under-resourced for subjective NLP tasks (sentiment, emotion, toxicity). The key issue isn’t just more data—but better, more representative data.
🗓 Sun, Mar 29
📍 Poster Hall
🔗 aclanthology.org/anthology-fi...

Can Reasoning Help LLMs Capture Human Annotator Disagreement?
Across 60 setups, reasoning methods actually hurt disagreement modeling—especially in high-variance cases where humans genuinely disagree.
🗓 Fri, Mar 27
📍 Salle La Palmeraie
🔗 aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-lo...

PATS: Personality-Aware Teaching Strategies with LLM Tutors
Aligning tutoring strategies with student personality improves learning interactions.
🗓 Wed, Mar 25
📍 Poster Session 3 (16:30–18:00)
🔗 aclanthology.org/2026.finding...

Excited to share that @milanlp.bsky.social will be presenting 5 new papers at #EACL2026 and workshops in Rabat 🇲🇦!

Only 3 days to go until the deadline!

🗣️ Last Friday, we had the pleasure of hosting @dustinbwright.com for an insightful talk on “LLMs Lack Perspective and Epistemic Diversity.”
The talk explored how diverse are the information and perspectives that people are being exposed to in this new era.

#NLProc

Dense Node Representation for Geolocation Tommaso Fornaciari, Dirk Hovy. Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2019). 2019.

#MemoryModay #NLProc 'Dense Node Representation for Geolocation' by Fornaciari & @dirkhovy.bsky.social reveals efficient geolocation methods using node2vec & doc2vec models. Greater network size, less parameters.

📚Yesterday in our reading group, Mareike Lisker presented "Artificial Hivemind: The Open-Ended Homogeneity of Language Models (and Beyond)" by Liwei Jiang et al. (2025)

Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22954

#NLProc

Geolocation with Attention-Based Multitask Learning Models Tommaso Fornaciari, Dirk Hovy. Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2019). 2019.

#TBT #NLProc 'Geolocation with Attention-Based Multitask Learning Models' by Tommaso Fornaciari, @dirkhovy.bsky.social (2019) reveals how online political talks can become one-sided. Breaking out of our bubbles! #SocialMedia

The Social and the Neural Network: How to Make Natural Language Processing about People again Dirk Hovy. Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Computational Modeling of People’s Opinions, Personality, and Emotions in Social Media. 2018.

#MemoryModay #NLProc 'Make Natural Language Processing About People Again' by @dirkhovy.bsky.social (2018) uncovers how AI models portray different religions and emotions. #AIEthics

Joel Tetreault (not on here) also has a great talk on the topic, with lots of interesting anecdotes

Predicting News Headline Popularity with Syntactic and Semantic Knowledge Using Multi-Task Learning Sotiris Lamprinidis, Daniel Hardt, Dirk Hovy. Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2018.

#TBT #NLProc 'Predicting News Headline Popularity' by Lamprinidis, Hardt, @dirkhovy.bsky.social (2018) shows neural networks perform similar to Logistic Regression in prediction.

One of my favorite studies of the last few years! Great read (albeit with a side of worrying implications for surveys)

This week in our reading group @taniseceron.bsky.social presented “Linear Representations of Political Perspective Emerge in LLMs”.
A study investigating how political biases are encoded in internal representations. 🧠

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2503.02080

#NLProc

📢 Call for Abstracts!
Towards a Safer Web for Women (co-located with #WebSci26)
📍 Braunschweig 🇩🇪 | 26 May 2026
Theme: Preventive approaches to women’s online safety
🗓 Deadline: 27 March 2026
🔗 forms.gle/tYheEgSwGecf...
🌐 tsww26.github.io