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Leonie Weissweiler

@weissweiler.bsky.social
828 followers 228 following 67 posts

Assistant Professor of NLP at Leipzig University, head of @lionlab.bsky.social PhD from LMU Munich, prev. Uppsala, UT Austin, Princeton, CMU, Cambridge computational linguistics, construction grammar, morphosyntax leonieweissweiler.github.io

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Leonie Weissweiler @weissweiler.bsky.social · 6h
📢I'm hiring a PhD student to work on interpretability for Protein Language Models! 🗓️There are now two weeks left to apply, find out more on the LION Lab website: lionlabnlp.github.io/jobs/ai4pf/
lionlabnlp.github.io
PhD Student Position in Interpretability for Protein Language Models — LION Lab
Fully funded PhD student position at LION Lab, Leipzig University, on interpretability for protein language models.
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ELLIS @ellis.eu · 25/09/2026
🏹 Job alert: PhD student position in Interpretability for Protein Language Models at Leipzig University 📍 Leipzig 🇩🇪 ⏰ 15 October 🔗 bit.ly/3V63Gpm
lionlabnlp.github.io
PhD Student Position in Interpretability for Protein Language Models — LION Lab
Fully funded PhD student position at LION Lab, Leipzig University, on interpretability for protein language models.
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Lukas Edman @lukasnlp.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Ever feel like it's too hard to keep track of what LLMs cannot do as well as humans? We're making your life easier over at: what-llms-can-not-do.github.io We're compiling a list of papers testing the abilities of LLMs against humans. Check it out! And you can help contribute too!
what-llms-can-not-do.github.io
What LLMs Can(not) Do
A living survey of benchmarks that compare large language models with humans.
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LION Lab @lionlab.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
🦁LION Lab is hiring! 🧑‍🔬One fully funded PhD student (TVL-13 100%) for 3 years 💉Topic: Interpretability for Protein Language Models 👥Advised by @weissweiler.bsky.social together with Clara Schoeder 🌍Leipzig, Germany 🔗Apply by Oct 15: lionlabnlp.github.io/jobs/ai4pf/ Please share! #NLProc #NLP
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Leonie Weissweiler @weissweiler.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
#COLING2027 has joined forces with #EACL2027 and #NAACL2027 for the call for tutorials! 📢Joint Call for Tutorial Proposals (EACL/NAACL/COLING) 2027 🗓️Submission deadline: Friday, 2 October 2026 📝Submit via softconf: softconf.com/p/eacl-tutor... 🔗Full call here: 2027.coling-iccl.org/calls/tutori...
2027.coling-iccl.org
Joint Call for Tutorial Proposals 2027
COLING 2027 Tutorials
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LION Lab @lionlab.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
We hope to see the UniDivers again soon in other settings 😊 Fun fact: the old town of Bucharest has been called the Lipscani District since the 17th century, because most of the wares sold on the high street at the time originated from Leipzig!
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LION Lab @lionlab.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
It was great seeing everyone again at the last Unidive General Meeting in Bucharest! Jacob Lee Suchardt presented a poster about his EMNLP 2025 paper on the Transcription of Unseen Languages with Speech-to-IPA Models, and we celebrated the past four years of UniDive and all the friends we made.
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LION Lab @lionlab.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Yesterday we had @anja.re from Technion visiting us to give a talk on Interpretability for Generative Information Retrieval. The talk was a cool example to show that interpretability can also be actionable. Thank you very much for joining us, Anja!
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LION Lab @lionlab.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
🗣️Today we had the pleasure of hosting @bbunzeck.bsky.social for a talk on how LLMs are not usage-based (yet). We learned a lot about the challenges of training smaller language models on dialogue data and evaluating from a production-based perspective. Thanks for coming, Bastian!
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LION Lab @lionlab.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
We had a great time yesterday listening to @davidrmortensen.bsky.social explain how The Reconstruction Will Not Be Supervised — because the Comparative Method of reconstructing the pronunciation of earlier languages can be automated using agents! Thanks for visiting, David!
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LION Lab @lionlab.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
🗣️We were delighted yesterday to welcome Nina Böbel to our lab for a talk on Language as a Linguistic Network. Thanks for coming and patiently teaching us about construction networks, Nina!
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Leonie Weissweiler @weissweiler.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
📢Call for Expressions of Interest: COLING 2027 Tutorials Tutorial chairs @microth.bsky.social and I are inviting expressions of interest for tutorials to be held at #COLING2027 in Macau in all areas of CL, NLP and related disciplines, in the categories 🚀cutting-edge, 🌱introductory, and 🤝community.
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Adele Goldberg @adelegoldberg.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
Congratulations Leonie! Hear her roar!
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Leonie Weissweiler @weissweiler.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
🥳I'm excited to introduce everyone to my group at Leipzig University, the LION (Linguistically-Oriented NLP) Lab! 🦁 Looking forward to exciting work on computational linguistics, interpretability, and multilinguality! Find out more on our website lionlabnlp.github.io
lionlabnlp.github.io
Home — LION Lab
LION Lab — Linguistically-Oriented NLP research group at the University of Leipzig.
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ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig @scadsai.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
Since April 1, @weissweiler.bsky.social assumes the position of Assistant Professor of Natural Language Processing at @unileipzig.bsky.social and will contribute her expertise to @scadsai.bsky.social as PI in the field of computational linguistics. 👉 scads.ai/research-on-...
scads.ai
Research on interpretable, multilingual language models: Leonie Weissweiler as new PI at ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig - ScaDS.AI
Starting April 1, Leonie Weissweiler will assume the position of Assistant Professor of Natural Language Processing at Leipzig University and will contribute her expertise to ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig ...
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ELLIS @ellis.eu · 21/01/2026
Meet @weissweiler.bsky.social, Postdoc at Uppsala Uni 🇸🇪 and ELLIS Member, working on #NLProc, computational linguistics & LM interpretability. She’s accepted an Assistant Prof position at Leipzig Uni 🇩🇪—the first female CompSci professor there—and is eager to support more women 👏 #WomenInELLIS
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Leonie Weissweiler @weissweiler.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
🧑‍🔬I’m recruiting PhD students in Natural Language Processing @unileipzig.bsky.social Computer Science, together with @scadsai.bsky.social! Topics include, but aren’t limited to: 🔎Linguistic Interpretability 🌍Multilingual Evaluation 📖Computational Typology Please share! #NLProc #NLP
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ELLIS @ellis.eu · 18/12/2025
🏹 Job alert: Two fully funded PhD positions in Natural Language Processing at University of Leipzig 📍 Leipzig 🇩🇪 📅 Apply by Jan 15th 🔗 ellis.eu/research/jobs/2025-12-16-t…
ellis.eu
Two fully funded PhD positions in Natural Language Processing at University of Leipzig | European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems
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ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig @scadsai.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
@weissweiler.bsky.social is setting up her own group at @unileipzig.bsky.social and @scadsai.bsky.social as Assistant Professor for #NaturalLanguageProcessing and is advertising two open PhD positions. 🥳 👉 Full announcement: leonieweissweiler.github.io/phd_leipzig....
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Leonie Weissweiler @weissweiler.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
🧑‍🔬I’m recruiting PhD students in Natural Language Processing @unileipzig.bsky.social Computer Science, together with @scadsai.bsky.social! Topics include, but aren’t limited to: 🔎Linguistic Interpretability 🌍Multilingual Evaluation 📖Computational Typology Please share! #NLProc #NLP
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Leonie Weissweiler @weissweiler.bsky.social · 10/12/2025
🥳Life Update! I’m thrilled to share that I’ll be starting as assistant professor for Natural Language Processing @unileipzig.bsky.social in April! I’m deeply grateful to everyone who supported me on this journey. I will be recruiting PhD students with @scadsai.bsky.social, stay tuned for details!
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Leonie Weissweiler @weissweiler.bsky.social · 19/11/2025
📢Out now in NEJLT!📢 In each of these sentences, a verb that doesn't usually encode motion is being used to convey that an object is moving to a destination. Given that these usages are rare, complex, and creative, we ask: Do LLMs understand what's going on in them? 🧵1/7
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Kyle Mahowald @kmahowald.bsky.social · 10/11/2025
Oh cool! Excited this LM + construction paper was SAC-Highlighted! Check it out to see how LM-derived measures of statistical affinity separate out constructions with similar words like "I was so happy I saw you" vs "It was so big it fell over".
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Leonie Weissweiler @weissweiler.bsky.social · 10/11/2025
I can confirm that I was indeed the 2nd author!
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Paul Lerner @lernerp.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
There's many directions where this could go, multilingual, low-resource language, interpretability, depending on your profile, and the internship may lead to a PhD, provided we get funding!
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Paul Lerner @lernerp.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
As we found in aclanthology.org/2025.coling-... that BPE-based LLMs (i.e. pretty much all LLMs) did not handle prefixations well
aclanthology.org
Unlike “Likely”, “Unlike” is Unlikely: BPE-based Segmentation hurts Morphological Derivations in LLMs
Paul Lerner, François Yvon. Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics. 2025.
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Paul Lerner @lernerp.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
Basically the idea is to extend www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... to see how well LLMs model competition between affixes, not only suffixes (e.g. -ity vs. -ness) but also prefixes (e.g. un- vs. non-)
pnas.org
Derivational morphology reveals analogical generalization in large language models | PNAS
What mechanisms underlie linguistic generalization in large language models (LLMs)? This question has attracted considerable attention, with most s...
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Paul Lerner @lernerp.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
Come work with @yvofr.bsky.social @weissweiler.bsky.social and me at @mlia-isir.bsky.social for a M2 internship on Assessing the Morphological Competence of LLMs! For 5-6 months from February or March 2026. Paid 600€/month
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Jaap Jumelet @jumelet.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
I'm in Suzhou to present our work on MultiBLiMP, Friday @ 11:45 in the Multilinguality session (A301)! Come check it out if your interested in multilingual linguistic evaluation of LLMs (there will be parse trees on the slides! There's still use for syntactic structure!) arxiv.org/abs/2504.02768
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Leonie Weissweiler @weissweiler.bsky.social · 04/11/2025
📢Come join us in Uppsala to work on multilingual NLP as an independent postdoc with the most wonderful colleagues! The deadline is Nov 26th, the expected start date is Feb 1st. Feel free to shoot me an email if you want to hear more about this department and I will continue gushing about it.
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Cory Shain @coryshain.bsky.social · 02/11/2025
Session 5: "BabyLM’s First Constructions." In a companion paper to the first one, we show that much of this constructional knowledge is even present in "babyLMs" with more developmentally plausible amounts of training: arxiv.org/abs/2506.02147. w/ @weissweiler.bsky.social
arxiv.org
BabyLM's First Constructions: Causal probing provides a signal of learning
Construction grammar posits that language learners acquire constructions (form-meaning pairings) from the statistics of their environment. Recent work supports this hypothesis by showing sensitivity…
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Cory Shain @coryshain.bsky.social · 02/11/2025
Session 4: "Constructions are Revealed in Word Distributions." We show that rich knowledge of syntactic constructions in masked language models (MLMs) is revealed by patterns of contextual constraint. arxiv.org/abs/2503.06048. w/ @weissweiler.bsky.social + @kmahowald.bsky.social
arxiv.org
Constructions are Revealed in Word Distributions
Construction grammar posits that constructions, or form-meaning pairings, are acquired through experience with language (the distributional learning hypothesis). But how much information about…
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Cory Shain @coryshain.bsky.social · 02/11/2025
If you're going to #EMNLP, Josh Rozner will be representing CLiMB Lab with 2 talks, sessions 4+5, both in A108, check them out!
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Kanishka Misra @kanishka.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
Happening now! Poster 42!
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Kanishka Misra @kanishka.bsky.social · 06/10/2025
Traveling to my first @colmweb.org🍁 Not presenting anything but here are two posters you should visit: 1. @qyao.bsky.social on Controlled rearing for direct and indirect evidence for datives (w/ me, @weissweiler.bsky.social and @kmahowald.bsky.social), W morning Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2503.20850
arxiv.org
Both Direct and Indirect Evidence Contribute to Dative Alternation Preferences in Language Models
Language models (LMs) tend to show human-like preferences on a number of syntactic phenomena, but the extent to which these are attributable to direct exposure to the phenomena or more general propert...
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Leonie Weissweiler @weissweiler.bsky.social · 15/09/2025
📢Life update📢 🥳I'm excited to share that I've started as a postdoc at Uppsala University NLP @uppsalanlp.bsky.social, working with Joakim Nivre on topics related to constructions and multilinguality! 🙏Many thanks to the Walter Benjamin Programme of the DFG for making this possible.
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Jaap Jumelet @jumelet.bsky.social · 01/08/2025
Happening now at the SIGTYP poster session! Come talk to Leonie and me about MultiBLiMP!
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Leonie Weissweiler @weissweiler.bsky.social · 21/06/2025
Hi #NLP community, I'm urgently looking for an emergency reviewer for the ARR Linguistic Theories track. The paper investigates and measures orthography across many languages. Please shoot me a quick email if you can review!
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Leonie Weissweiler @weissweiler.bsky.social · 11/06/2025
I'm looking for a reviewer for a paper on measuring syntactic productivity (lots of maths!) due a week from now. Please shoot me an email if you could review!
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Ai2 @ai2.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
Do LLMs learn language via rules or analogies? This could be a surprise to many – models rely heavily on stored examples and draw analogies when dealing with unfamiliar words, much as humans do. Check out this new study led by @valentinhofmann.bsky.social to learn how they made the discovery 💡
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Valentin Hofmann @valentinhofmann.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
Thrilled to share that this is out in @pnas.org today! 🎉 We show that linguistic generalization in language models can be due to underlying analogical mechanisms. Shoutout to my amazing co-authors @weissweiler.bsky.social, @davidrmortensen.bsky.social, Hinrich Schütze, and Janet Pierrehumbert!
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Kwanghee Choi @juice500ml.bsky.social · 29/04/2025
Can self-supervised models 🤖 understand allophony 🗣? Excited to share my new #NAACL2025 paper: Leveraging Allophony in Self-Supervised Speech Models for Atypical Pronunciation Assessment arxiv.org/abs/2502.07029 (1/n)
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Verena Blaschke @verenablaschke.bsky.social · 29/04/2025
On my way to #NAACL2025 where I'll give a keynote at the noisy text workshop (WNUT), presenting some of the challenges & methods for dialect NLP + also discussing dialect speakers' perspectives! 🗨️ Beyond “noisy” text: How (and why) to process dialect data 🗓️ Saturday, May 3, 9:30–10:30
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Leonie Weissweiler @weissweiler.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
🌍📣🥳 I could not be more excited for this to be out! With a fully automated pipeline based on Universal Dependencies, 43 non-Indoeuropean languages, and the best LLMs only scoring 90.2%, I hope this will be a challenging and interesting benchmark for multilingual NLP. Go test your language models!
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Leonie Weissweiler @weissweiler.bsky.social · 31/03/2025
We can use small LMs to test hypotheses about the language network and how everything is connected! Here, we find that dative alternation preferences are learned from dative-specific input statistics *and* from more general short-first preferences. Great work by @qyao.bsky.social, go follow him!
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Leshem (Legend) Choshen @EMNLP @lchoshen.bsky.social · 31/03/2025
Models have preferences like giving inanimate 📦 stuff to animate 👳 Is it that they just saw a lot of such examples in pretraining or is it generalization and deeper understanding? alphaxiv.org/pdf/2503.20850
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Leonie Weissweiler @weissweiler.bsky.social · 12/03/2025
✨New paper ✨ RoBERTa knows the difference between "so happy that you're here", "so certain that I'm right" and "so happy that I cried"! Exciting result (and more) from Josh Rozner along with @coryshain.bsky.social, @kmahowald.bsky.social and myself, go check it out!
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Siyuan Song @siyuansong.bsky.social · 12/03/2025
New preprint w/ @jennhu.bsky.social @kmahowald.bsky.social : Can LLMs introspect about their knowledge of language? Across models and domains, we did not find evidence that LLMs have privileged access to their own predictions. 🧵(1/8)
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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 10/03/2025
If you are working as an AC or SAC for ARR and would like to join some kind of *unofficial* Slack channel to ask each other questions and figure out this process together, please comment in this thread or send me a message. #ACL2025
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Leonie Weissweiler @weissweiler.bsky.social · 06/03/2025
Is it intentional that aclanthology.org/anthology.bi... contains journal papers, e.g. from TACL and CL, but aclanthology.org/anthology.bib does not? Has anyone else noticed this? @aclmeeting.bsky.social
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