I do not update this site

For up-to-date information, please see my official AAU website: https://vbn.aau.dk/en/persons/jbjerva

Research Profile

I’m a Full Professor affiliated with the Data, Knowledge, and Web Engineering (DKW) research group at the Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University (Campus Copenhagen). Before this, I was a tenure-track assistant professor for just under a year in the same group. I’m currently the team lead for the Copenhagen branch of the Department of Computer Science, and a member of Det Unge Akademi (the Young Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters). I spent three years as a postdoctoral researcher working with Isabelle Augenstein in CopeNLU, one of the NLP groups at the Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen. I did my PhD in Natural Language Processing at the University of Groningen working within the Parallel Meaning Bank project supervised by Johan Bos, and co-supervised by Barbara Plank. I spent most of the final year of my PhD visiting the Department of Linguistics at Stockholm University.

My research is characterised by a high focus on interdisciplinary interaction between linguistics and NLP. In 2022 I was awarded a Semper Ardens: Accelerate grant of 5 million DKK from the Carlsberg Foundation which funds three PhD students and a three-year postdoc, focussing on this interaction. Most recently I’ve been exploring the possibilities and risks in using Large Language Models (LLMs, e.g. ChatGPT and similar technologies) in the education system.

I teach on the Software BSc. education, where I focus on delivering high-quality teaching, with an approach emphasising elements of interactivity and connecting theory to practice. As a result, I was in 2020-2021 selected by our students as Teacher of the Year at the Department of Computer Science at AAU.

Academic Background

• 2024- | Full Professor, Data, Knowledge, and Web Engineering (DKW), Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University (Campus Copenhagen), Denmark

• 2021-2024 | Associate Professor, Data, Knowledge, and Web Engineering (DKW), Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University (Campus Copenhagen), Denmark

• 2020-2021 | Assistant Professor (Tenure-Track), Database and Web-technologies (DW), Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University (Campus Copenhagen), Denmark

• 2017-2020 | Postdoctoral Researcher, Machine Learning section, Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

• 2013-2017 | PhD, Natural Language Processing, CLCG, University of Groningen, The Netherlands – Thesis: One Model to Rule them all – Multitask and Multilingual Modelling for Lexical Analysis

• 2012-2013 | M.A. Computational Linguistics Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, Sweden

• 2009-2012 | B.A. Computational Linguistics Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, Sweden

Links

• Twitter
• Scholar
• GitHub
• LinkedIn

Activities

2023

• I stopped updating this site - for up-to-date information, please see my official AAU website: https://vbn.aau.dk/en/persons/jbjerva
• I’ve been admitted to Det Unge Akademi (the Young Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters).
• I’ve been appointed team lead of the Copenhagen branch of the Department of Computer Science, AAU.
• I’ll be at NoDaLiDa and EACL, where some of the TypNLP project’s first publications by Marcell Fekete and Yiyi Chen will be presented!
• I was live on TV2 News discussing ChatGPT in education and exams.
• I was interviewed by TV2 on ChatGPT in Exams
• I was interviewed by Børsen about the impact of Large Language Models on low-resource language communities.
• I was interviewed for Danish national media (DR.dk and the evening news (~20:00 in this clip)) regarding ChatGPT - (1) On usage of ChatGPT to optimize writing processes, and (2) on ChatGPT in Web Search.
• I featured in an episode of the podcast “Lærerværelset”, discussing Language Models such as ChatGPT in the context of High School Education (in Danish).
• We got seed funding for a project entitled Comparing Multilingual Discourse on Migration Using NLP. Very excited to start a new collaboration with Anamaria Dutceac Segesten and Kristian Gade Kjelmann!
• I was interviewed for two articles in Gymnasieskolen.dk, broadly on the topic of ChatGPT in High School Education in Denmark.
• I gave a webinar for EGN on possibilities and risks in integrating ChatGPT and similar technologies, with 1,000 attendees.

2022

• I was featured in the Danish evening news (DR) as an NLP expert, approximately at 14:05 in this clip.
• I appeared in the Danish national media (DR) as an NLP expert, regarding ChatGPT and its use in education.
• The entire project team (3 PhD students + 1 postdoc) for the Carlsberg project have started
• I'm hiring three PhD students, starting on 1 September 2022
• I’ve been awarded a Semper Ardens: Accelerate grant / Carlsberg Foundation Young Researcher Fellowship of 5 million DKK!

2021

• As of 1 November, I’m on paternity leave for 4.5 months :)
• As of 1 July, I’ve been promoted to associate professor at AAU Copenhagen!
• I gave a keynote talk at the SIGTYP 2021 workshop
• I gave an invited talk at HHU Düsseldorf
• I’m currently hosting a visit from Arturo Oncevay (PhD student, U. of Edinburgh), funded by a Multi3Generation STSM.
• I’ll be giving an invited talk at the Cambridge NLP Seminar Series, on 5 March
• I’ll be giving an invited talk at the AAU AI Seminar Series, on 25 March
• Looking forward to meta-reviewing papers as Area Chair for *SEM 2021
• Paper on computational typology with adversarial training accepted to EACL 2021!
• I’ll be a keynote speaker at SigTyp 2021, co-located with EACL 2021!

2020

• Happy to have been invited as one of the area chairs for EACL 2021
• Our Shared Task description paper for SigTyp 2020 is now online! [Pre-print]
• Held a workshop for SSH scholars, as part of the DigHumLab’s Digital Literacy course [Presentation Slides]
• Paper on Unsupervised QA Evaluation with my previous MSc. student Lukas Muttenthaler accepted to BlackBoxNLP @ EMNLP 2020!
• Two papers accepted to EMNLP 2020. Looking forward to share joint work with CopeNLU and Megagon Labs
• Excited to begin a tenure-track assistant professorship at Aalborg University, Campus Copenhagen, from 15 August onward
• I’m coordinating the SIGTYP shared task on computational typology
• Our paper on temporal data drift in NLP has been accepted to AAAI 2020

2019

• Very excited to have a grant proposal (4,000,000 SEK) on Structured Multilinguality accepted by the Swedish Research Council. The project is lead by Robert Östling at Stockolm University.
• Visiting Megagon Labs (Mountain View, CA) for two weeks in October/November, and gave a talk on computational typology
• Visited the University of Zurich and gave a talk on computational typology, in October
• Our paper on transductive auxiliary task self-training has been accepted to DeepLo 2019 at EMNLP!
• I was awarded 7,000 USD as part of the Google Cloud Platform research credits programme!
• Our paper entitled “Uncovering Probabilistic Implications in Typological Knowledge Bases” has been accepted to ACL 2019!
• Visited the University of Waikato (New Zealand) and gave a talk on computational typology, in April
• Our paper entitled “A Probabilistic Generative Model of Linguistic Typology” has been accepted to NAACL 2019!
• Our paper on Language Representations has been accepted to the journal Computational Linguistics (June 2019 issue)!
• I will be on a panel discussing AI in the context of the movie Her, both in February and March 2019.

2018

• I was asked to comment on AI Theory of Mind for a New Scientist article.
• I was an external reviewer for the European Research Council (ERC - Advanced Grant - €2.5 million)
• Short paper with Miryam de Lhoneux accepted to EMNLP 2018!
• I was a lab monitor at Lisbon Machine Learning School (LxMLS 2018), Lisbon, Portugal.
• Presented work on computational typology at NAACL 2018, New Orleans, LA. [Article]
• Long paper accepted to NAACL 2018! [Article]
• I spent two weeks as a visiting researcher at Jörg Tiedemann’s NLP group (University of Helsinki, Finland) *Presented a paper at IWCLUL-2018 – Helsinki, Finland [Slides]

2017

• I succesfully defended my PhD thesis at the University of Groningen!
• I was awarded a Titan Xp GPU as part of the NVIDIA GPU Grant Program!
• I am serving as Publicity Chair for *SEM 2018!
• I attended the Google NLP Summit in Zürich, Switzerland
• Presented a poster at the BEA workshop in Copenhagen
• Started my postdoc at CoAStaL NLP
• Submitted my PhD thesis!
• I’m joining the CoAStaL NLP group, post-docing for Isabelle Augenstein!
• Presented joint work with Robert Östling at CoNLL-SIGMORPHON 2017 in Vancouver, Canada [Article]
• Won best short paper at NoDaLiDa 2017! [Article]
• Presented two short papers at NoDaLiDa 2017 in Gothenburg, Sweden