Arianna Bisazza

Arianna Bisazza is an Associate Professor in the Computational Linguistics Group at the University of Groningen, where she leads the InClow research group focused on Interpretable, Cognitively inspired, Low-resource language models. Her work bridges computational linguistics, cognitive science, and language acquisition to develop more robust and interpretable language processing algorithms that can adapt to diverse linguistic phenomena worldwide.

Dr. Bisazza's research interests span statistical modeling of human languages in multilingual contexts, with particular focus on improving language model performance for "challenging" or low-resource languages. Her work explores how insights from human language acquisition can inform better language modeling techniques, and she investigates methods to make state-of-the-art NLP systems more interpretable and transparent. As a cross-disciplinary researcher, she actively seeks to enhance our understanding of human language processing and evolution through computational modeling tools.

Her recent publications reveal a strong emphasis on multilingual evaluation frameworks (like TurBLiMP and MultiBLiMP), interpretability of language models, and connections between human language acquisition and neural network learning. Her work consistently addresses the challenge of making language technology more robust across diverse linguistic structures and typological features.

• Outstanding Paper Award at the BabyLM Challenge (CoNLL'24 Shared Task) for "BabyLM Challenge: Exploring the Effect of Variation Sets on Language Model Training Efficiency"

Dr. Bisazza currently leads a Vidi project funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) on improving low-resource language modeling through child language acquisition insights. She is also part of two national consortium projects funded by NWA-ORC initiatives: InDeep (Interpreting deep learning models for language, speech & music) and LESSEN (Low Resource Chat-based Conversational Intelligence). She supervises multiple PhD students, including two China Scholarship Council (CSC)-funded researchers working on simulating human patterns of language learning and change. Her earlier research was supported by a Veni grant (2017-2021) focused on understanding and improving the encoding of linguistic structure in Neural Machine Translation models.

As head of the InClow research group, Dr. Bisazza oversees a team investigating interpretable, cognitively inspired approaches to low-resource language modeling. The group's work combines insights from cognitive science and linguistics with cutting-edge NLP techniques to develop language models that better reflect human language processing capabilities, particularly in resource-constrained settings.