Year 1 Anniversary

We’re marking a milestone: the first anniversary of the Utrecht NLP Hub, aka NLP@U. We’re pleased to report that our initial goal of fostering cross-faculty collaboration at Utrecht University, UMCU, and beyond is now a reality.
To celebrate, the Faculty of Humanities hosted our 2025-2026 anniversary meeting, featuring a compelling presentation by Esam Ghaleb on “Speech and Gesture Interaction in Face-to-Face Dialogue: From Analysis to Generation.”

Esam’s research addresses a fundamental aspect of human communication often overlooked in NLP: the multimodal nature of face-to-face interaction. His work demonstrates how self-supervised learning can create stronger gesture representations when grounded in co-occurring speech, and introduces a speech-driven gesture generator that integrates semantic, acoustic, and prosodic cues. These advances point toward more naturalistic human-computer interaction, where virtual avatars can generate context-appropriate gestures that match both the content and timing of speech.

The event brought together researchers from across Utrecht University and UMCU for presentations, research group updates, and collaborative pitches. The informal networking sessions and discussions reinforced what we set out to achieve a year ago: creating an Utrecht-based space where NLP methods can cross disciplinary boundaries, from linguistics and literary studies to biomedical research and history. This first year has shown that bringing together diverse perspectives strengthens both the applications and the fundamental research in our field.

Thanks to our organizing team (Antal van den Bosch, Ayoub Bagheri, Albert Gatt, Ece Takmaz, and Ruurd Kuiper) and to every member who’s contributed to making this first year meaningful.

Interested in NLP@U community? Whether you’re an experienced computational linguist or just starting to explore text analysis methods, we’d love to connect.