Invited Speakers

Alexander Clark

Alexander Clark is a Visiting Research Fellow in CLASP (Centre for linguistic theory and studies in probability) at the University of Gothenburg. Before that he taught in the Department of Philosophy at King's College London; and in the Computer Science department of Royal Holloway, University of London. His first degree was in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and his Ph.D. is from the University of Sussex. He did postdoctoral research at the University of Geneva. His research is interdisciplinary and lies in the intersection between unsupervised learning in computational linguistics, and theoretical and mathematical linguistics. His most recent book "Empiricism and Language Learnability" with Nick Chater, John Goldsmith and Andy Perfors was published by OUP.

Katrin Erk

Katrin Erk is a professor in the Linguistics and Computer Science departments at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research expertise is in the area of computational linguistics, especially semantics. Her work is on distributed, flexible approaches to describing word meaning, and on integrating them with representations at the sentence or discourse level.  At the word level, she studies flexible representations of meaning, and the ways in which they are constrained by context. At the sentence level, she explores frameworks that can draw inferences both based on sentence structure and flexible word meanings. She also studies narrative schemas, the ways in which they influence word meaning, and the inferences that they afford. Katrin Erk completed her dissertation on tree description languages and ellipsis at Saarland University in 2002. After that, she was a postdoc in the computational linguistics department at Saarland University from 2002 to 2006. In 2006, she joined the Linguistics Department at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2025, she moved to the University of Massachusetts Amherst.s.

Joakim Nivre

Joakim Nivre is Professor of Computational Linguistics at Uppsala University. He holds a Ph.D. in General Linguistics from the University of Gothenburg and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Växjö University. His research focuses on data-driven methods for natural language processing, in particular for morphosyntactic and semantic analysis. He is one of the main developers of the transition-based approach to syntactic dependency parsing, described in his 2006 book Inductive Dependency Parsing and implemented in the widely used MaltParser system, and one of the founders of the Universal Dependencies project, which aims to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages and currently involves nearly 200 languages and over 700 researchers around the world. He has produced over 300 scientific publications and has over 27,000 citations according to Google Scholar (June, 2025). He is a fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics and was the president of the association in 2017.