Human-Centered Data Science


We are a research group founded by Prof. Lisa Beinborn. We work on natural language processing (NLP) with a human-centered perspective and are affiliated with the Computer Science Institute and the Campus Institute Data Science at the University of Göttingen.

Team

Our team is growing. Come join us!


Prof. Lisa Beinborn
Group Head

Victor Zimmermann
PhD Student

Jana Hackethal
Team Assistant
   
Miyu Oba
Guest Researcher
Jonathan Kamp
Associated PhD
Jenia Kim
Associated PhD

News

  1. Lisa Beinborn has been awarded an Impulsprofessur which allows us to increase our group by three researchers working towards poly-vocal language models. If you are interested in a PhD or PostDoc position, please contact us. The call will be out soon.

  2. We will be presenting four papers at EMNLP 2025 in Miami:

    • We explore the frequency bias of current language models and propose a new approach called Syntactic Smoothing that reduces both frequency bias and anisotropy of the representational space. Richard Diehl Martinez will present our poster on Wednesday, 4pm, in the language modeling session (session 9).

    • Most language models represent the input using characters. For our submission to the ConLL BabyLM Challenge, we explored the capabilities of a language model that learns from speech-like input represented as phonemes. Zébulon Goriely will present our work on Saturday, 3pm.

    • Jenia Kim explores the topic of adaptive simplification of municipal texts and presents her poster at the TSAR workshop, on Friday, 1pm.

    • Our guest researcher Miyu Oba shows that language models still have a hard time inducing grammatical knowledge from indirect evidence on Tuesday, 4pm, at session 4 on cognitive modeling and psycholinguistics.

  3. Lisa Beinborn and Nora Hollenstein wrote a book on Cognitive Plausibility in Natural Language Processing.


Research


We develop computational models that account for human variation, uncertainty, and cognitive complexity and are currently most interested in the following topics:
  • Multilingual NLP
  • Cognitively plausible representation learning
  • Interpretability and bias of machine learning models
  • Educational language technology
  • Modelling eye-tracking data of language processing
Have a look at our projects and publications!


Teaching


We are always looking for motivated students to work with us. If you like our courses and want to dig deeper, reach out to claplab@uni-goettingen.de. Have a look at our thesis topics or pitch your own idea based on a recent paper or a shared task.