NLP@U Period-4 Meeting

The 2025-2026 period-4 meeting of NLP@U will be hosted by the University medical center in Utrecht on July 2nd.

There will be two presentations by invited researchers:

Gijs Wijnholds, assistant professor in the Text Mining and Retrieval Group at Leiden University, with a background in compositional distributional semantics and experience in both theoretical and applied NLP research.

Title: Probing, Prompting and Reasoning with (Large) Language Models

Abstract: I will discuss ongoing work probing and prompting language models for their understanding of discontinuous dependencies in English, Dutch and German, testing the hypothesis that crossing dependencies as found in Dutch are easier to comprehend than their well-nested German counterparts. If time permits, I present a recent pilot study on neurosymbolic reasoning with LLMs, focusing on hard Natural Language Inference (NLI) tasks.

Suzan Verberne, Professor of Natural Language Processing at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), with expertise at the intersection of NLP and Information Retrieval.

Title: The search engine of the future is a chatbot

Abstract: The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) and LLM-based chatbots has had a huge impact on the interaction of users with information. Many people argue that the age of search engines as we know them has ended, while other people argue that retrieval technology is more relevant than ever before. In my talk I will argue that both statements are true. I will discuss the multiple relations between LLMs and Information Retrieval: how can they strengthen each other, what are the challenges we face, and what directions should we go in our research? 

Pitches and discussion:

We are inviting submissions for the pitches-and-discussion section. Participants may submit a tentative title and a description. Each selected participant will have two (2) minutes to either:

1. Describe an idea you are working on, and ask if anyone is interested in discussing this idea with you, or
2. Propose a topic for debate immediately afterwards.

Each pitch will be followed by thirteen (13) minutes of discussion.
E-mail ads@uu.nl to submit your pitch.

Programme:

In addition to the talks, there will be a round of short pitches. The lunch and the coffee break will offer plenty of time to network and chat informally.

Location

UMCU, Van Peperzeelzaal

• Take the main entrance of the UMC (plan route).
• Walk straight ahead following route Q, past the waiting area and shops.
• Keep following route Q and enter the Q building through the blue doors.
• You will reach an elevator block on your left-hand side. Take the elevator or the stairs to floor S (which is located between floors 1 and 2).
• Walk straight ahead into the corridor. The “van Peperzeelzaal” is behind the blue wall.