Starting April 1, Leonie Weissweiler will assume the position of Assistant Professor of Natural Language Processing at Leipzig University. She will contribute her expertise to ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig as a Principal Investigator in the field of computational linguistics.

ChatGPT, an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, is arguably the best-known product of computational linguistics. Language models have also become an indispensable part of our daily lives through voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, search engine queries, and autocorrect and text prediction on our smartphones. Computational linguistics deals with how computer-based applications that process language can be constructed. Furthermore, it focuses on more fundamental questions associated with this field. For instance, researchers explore how language models “learn” to understand language and what this reveals about human language and its structure. Leonie Weissweiler, new assistant professor of natural language processing and principal investigator at ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig, addresses these questions, as well as the implications of Large Language Models for linguistic theory and their potential applications in linguistic typology.

„I am happy that Leonie Weissweiler is joining the Institute of Computer Science and ScaDS.AI Leipzig now. Her expertise on weaknesses and improvements of large language models will substantially strengthen our research and teaching in one of the most prominent areas of science today“. (Prof. Gerik Scheuermann – Director of ScaDS.AI Leipzig)

Linguistic Diversity and its Representation in Language Models

While working as a postdoc at Uppsala University’s Department of Computational Linguistics, on topics related to constructions and multilingualism, she will now continue her research on interpretable, multilingual language models at Leipzig University, focusing on linguistic diversity and its representation in language models. Many of the world’s more than 7,000 languages are severely underrepresented in both linguistics and language models because too little data is available for them. Leonie Weissweiler aims in particular to better model such underrepresented languages in order to make language technology accessible to more people.

“Language models have grown rapidly in recent years and, as a result, have become more sophisticated, undeniably driving progress in computational linguistics. To make this progress accessible to everyone, the models would need to become smaller so that they can run not only in leading data centers, and they would need to provide much better coverage of the world’s more than 7,000 languages.”, explains Leonie Weissweiler.

Focus on Interdisciplinary Work at ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig

Beyond her core research area, Leonie Weissweiler will focus particularly on interdisciplinary work at Leipzig University and ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig. As language models are now being applied not only by the public but also in many research fields outside of core AI research. “For me, this makes interdisciplinary work more interesting and relevant than ever, and ScaDS.AI offers the perfect opportunity to explore new areas of application and build collaborations.”

„I am super excited to welcome Leonie to Leipzig University. Her expertise in Natural Language processing fills a critical research gap at Leipzig University. Her openness to engage in collaborations will strengthen many research programs in the area”. (Prof. Jens Meiler – Director of ScaDS.AI Leipzig)

Academic Career of Leonie Weissweiler

Leonie Weissweiler received her Ph.D. in 2024 from the Center for Information and Language Processing at LMU Munich, focusing on computational approaches to construction grammar and morphology. During this time, she spent several months on exchange at Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University. She subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin and at the Department of Computational Linguistics at Uppsala University.

We are delighted to welcome Leonie Weissweiler here at ScaDS.AI and wish her all the best.