James Henderson

James Henderson is a Senior Researcher at Idiap Research Institute where he heads the Natural Language Understanding group. He currently serves as Action Editor for Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL) and was recently awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for his project 'Interpretable Beliefs and Programmable Knowledge with Bayesian Attention in Large Language Models' (BALM). Previously, Henderson held positions as Chargé de Cours at University of Geneva's Department of Computer Science and Principal Scientist at Xerox Research Centre Europe (now Naver Labs Europe).

Henderson's research focuses on machine learning methods for natural language processing, with pioneering work on recurrent neural networks for syntactic and semantic parsing. His current investigations include representation learning for language semantics, graph-to-graph deep learning models, entity induction, and variational-Bayesian attention-based representation learning. His research bridges Bayesian inference, transformer architectures, and structured prediction for NLP tasks.

His publication portfolio demonstrates consistent contributions to core NLP methodologies, with recent emphasis on transformer optimization, Bayesian neural methods, efficient model architectures, and graph-based language representations. Research frequently appears in top venues including ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, and NeurIPS.

Honors:

• ERC Advanced Grant (2023)

Henderson leads the Natural Language Understanding group at Idiap, currently recruiting PhD students and postdoctoral researchers for his ERC project. He obtained his PhD and MSc from University of Pennsylvania and BSc from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in computer science.