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

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. We have open positions for a PhD candidate and a PostDoc.
   
   
2. Lisa Beinborn has been awarded an Impulsprofessur grant to work towards poly-vocal language models that can account for cross-lingual and individual differences.
   
   
3. Our group has been very active at EMNLP 2025 in Miami:
   
   
   • We explored 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.
     
     
   • Our group won both of the outstanding paper awards at the ConLL BabyLM Challenge. Lisa Beinborn cooperated with researchers from Cambridge to analyze the capabilities of a language model that learns from speech-like input represented as phonemes. Our guest researcher Miyu Oba worked on variation sets. Together with a Groningen-Tokyo-Nara combo she systematically used sets of varied sentences expressing a similar intent during language model pre-training.
     
     
   • Jenia Kim presented her ideas for adaptive simplification of municipal texts at the TSAR workshop.
     
     
   • Miyu Oba showed that language models still have a hard time inducing grammatical knowledge from indirect evidence.
     
   
   
4. Lisa Beinborn and Nora Hollenstein wrote a book on Cognitive Plausibility in Natural Language Processing.
   
   

Research

• Multilingual NLP
• Cognitively plausible representation learning
• Interpretability and bias of machine learning models
• Educational language technology
• Modelling eye-tracking data of language processing

Teaching