I'm a postdoctoral researcher interested in machine translation, unreasonably effective neural networks, phonetics and acoustics, markup technologies. Also, I find teaching super exciting!

I am working with Sarah Ebling, Annette Rios and others on automatic sign language translation. I am part of a large EU project called EASIER.

Currently I am most interested in the following:

• Scientific integrity, reproducibility, evaluation protocols, significance testing
• Sign language processing
• Translating sign languages
• Teaching NMT
• Robustness of NMT systems

Planning a programming project or thesis related to the topics mentioned above? Come talk to me, I'd love to hear about it.

(Things I used to do.)

• 08/2023: Check out our new repository for spoken-to-signed translation systems(and paper with more background). Feedback and contributions are welcome.
• 07/2023: We have a paper accepted at ACL 2023 on the pitfalls of sign language translation based on glosses, and received an Outstanding Paper Award! Congratulations to the entire team.
• 06/2023: I was in Tampere, Finland for EAMT 2023. Presented an overview of the shared task on sign language translation,  and participated in the AT4SSL workshop.
• 06/2023: Our paper on voting booklet bias received a Best Poster Award at Swisstext 2023! Congratulations to my co-authors.
• 03/2023: Our paper on sign language translation for African sign languages was accepted to AfricaNLP 2023. Also, we received a Best Paper Award! Congratulations to my student Shester.
• 02/2023: I obtained a Bridge Postdoc grant funded by the Digital Society Initiative (DSI) to work on sign language machine translation for 4 more years!
• 02/2023: Our paper on multimodal, multi-task sign language translation was accepted to ICLR 2023.
• 02/2023: Our paper on machine translation using Signwriting was accepted to EACL 2023.
• 12/2022: We have a new preprint article: Considerations for meaningful sign language machine translation based on glosses
• 12/2022: The WMT-SLT22 shared task is now concluded and I presented the outcome at WMT/EMNLP in Abu Dhabi. Findings paper
• 04/2022: I gave an invited lecture in Lena Jäger's machine learning course, on Reproducibility in Natural Language Processing.
• 01/2022: The WMT-SLT22 shared task on sign language translation will be funded by the European Association for Machine Translation (EAMT) and the Microsoft Accessibility division. Thank you to the sponsors!
• 12/2021: Together with others I am launching an exciting new WMT shared task, on sign language translation (WMT-SLT22).
• 11/2021: Invited talk at the NLP Meetup Zurich, topic: A Casual Q&A Session on Machine Translation.
• 10/2021: Invited lecture at the University of Berne, Switzerland, on recurrent neural networks. Recording.
• 10/2021: Invited talk in the SIGTYP lecture series, Exploring a Sampling-based Alternative to Beam Search. More info and recording.
• 09/2021: I finished my PhD! Read the thesis here. I can recommend the background chapters, especially the introduction to NMT.

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