Leonie Weissweiler
@weissweiler.bsky.social
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
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!
🗣️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!
📢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.
Congratulations Leonie! Hear her roar!
Leonie Weissweiler@weissweiler.bsky.social · last mo.🥳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
🥳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
Home — LION Lab
LION Lab — Linguistically-Oriented NLP research group at the University of Leipzig.
lionlabnlp.github.io
LION Lab@lionlab.bsky.social · last mo.Hello world! We are LION(Linguistically-Oriented NLP) Lab🦁, a new research group at Leipzig University, working on interpretability and evaluation of (multilingual) language models, and the application of NLP methods to linguistics, esp. typology! lionlabnlp.github.io Meet our PhD students below🧵
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-...
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 ...
scads.ai
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
🧑🔬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
🏹 Job alert: Two fully funded PhD positions in Natural Language Processing at University of Leipzig 📍 Leipzig 🇩🇪 📅 Apply by Jan 15th 🔗 https://ellis.eu/research/jobs/2025-12-16-two-fully-funded-phd-positions-in-natural-language-processing
Two fully funded PhD positions in Natural Language Processing at University of Leipzig | European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems
ellis.eu
@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....
Leonie Weissweiler@weissweiler.bsky.social · 8mo ago🧑🔬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
🧑🔬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
🥳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!
📢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
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".
Cory Shain@coryshain.bsky.social · 9mo agoJosh Rozner's paper (w/ @rifter.bsky.social + @kmahowald.bsky.social) was an SAC Highlight at #EMNLP25! aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-m...
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!
As we found in aclanthology.org/2025.coling-... that BPE-based LLMs (i.e. pretty much all LLMs) did not handle prefixations well
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.
aclanthology.org
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-)
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...
pnas.org
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
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
📢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.
Uppsala NLP@uppsalanlp.bsky.social · 9mo ago📢 Open Positions at the Uppsala NLP Group! 📢 Postdoc opportunity — also open to recent or soon-to-be PhD graduates (within 1–2 months). uu.varbi.com/en/what:job/...
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
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…
arxiv.org
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
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…
arxiv.org
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!
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
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...
arxiv.org
📢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.
Happening now at the SIGTYP poster session! Come talk to Leonie and me about MultiBLiMP!
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!
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!
