News and Events
We host a full schedule of CL/NLP talks, career events, and info sessions throughout the academic year, and list here a selection of what's happened so far in the 2024-25 academic year. We will add content from prior years in the coming months!
Colloquium by Professor Guergana Savova, Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School
April 25, 2025 – CL Events
We are excited to announce a talk by Guergana Savova, PhD, Professor and Patricia F. Brennan Chair in the Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who will present in our CL/NLP Colloquium Series about her ongoing work. Stay tuned for the title and abstract!
CL Professor Constantine Lignos receives Walzer Teaching Award
April 11, 2025 – CL News
We are thrilled to announce that, at the April 11 university faculty meeting, Computer Science Professor Constantine Lignos, one of our CL-specialized faculty, was named as the 2024-25 recipient of The Michael L. Walzer ’56 Award for Teaching. The award is given each year to a tenure-track faculty member who combines superlative scholarship with inspired teaching, including the strength of student course evaluations and nominations by students and faculty. He will be honored at an upcoming university Celebration of Teaching event, and his name will be added to a plaque for award winners posted in the International Lounge on campus.
Many congratulations, Constantine!
Colloquium by Professor James Hendler of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
April 9, 2025 – CS and CL/NLP Events
Computer Science Professor James Hendler of the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute gave a talk in the Computer Science Department Speaker series entitled “Are Semantic Web, Knowledge Graphs and GOFI still needed in the age of LLMs?” (To give away the punch line, Dr. Handler’s emphatic answer was “Yes”!)
Alumni and Area Professionals Join a CL MS Alumni and Current Student Panel Discussion and Networking Afternoon
April 5, 2025 – CL/NLP Career Events
The Brandeis CL/NLP community came together on Saturday, April 5 for an organized afternoon of rich discussions, connections, and networking – to provide students and alumni with additional resources and perspective for their careers.
A big thank you to our alumni who returned to campus to connect with each other and our current students – and to our alumni and distinguished area professionals who served on the two discussion panels we held, providing a stimulating discussion and Q&A session.
We are so grateful for the depth of knowledge and perspective on the current state of industry work in CL/NLP shared by all of our panelists!
- Panel Discussion 1: The Job Search in CL/NLP featured advice and tips from CL MS alumni on job searching in the current market – both for the first job after graduation, and for positions later into a career. The discussion was moderated by CL MS Vice Chair and co-CL/NLP Industry Liaison Professor Lotus Goldberg, and featured the following panelists:
- Josh Broderick Phillips, CL MS ‘24, MITRE
- Lizzie Liang, CL MS ‘20, Google
- Chester Palen-Michel, CL MS ‘18, Brandeis CS PhD student & eBay
- Hannah Provenza, CL MS ‘17, Accrete AI
- Panel Discussion 2: The Longer View – Future Directions for CL/NLP over the Next 5-10 Years featured a panel of established professionals from CL/NLP giving their perspectives, followed by discussion and Q&A with program faculty, students, and alumni. The discussion was moderated by CL MS Chair Professor James Pustejovsky, and featured the following panelists:
- Olga Babko-Malaya, PhD, Principal Research Scientist, BAE Systems
- Marie Meteer, PhD, Director of Applications Research at Pryon; previously an Associate Professor of the Practice & Industry Liaison in the Brandeis CL MS program
- Tim Miller, PhD, Boston Children's Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School
- Brian Ulicny, PhD, Associate Director for Research in the Analytics and Machine Intelligence Group, RTX BBN Technologies
The lively discussions continued after the formal panel sessions with informal chatting and networking for the rest of the afternoon. Again our sincere thanks to everyone who made the event a success!
Brandeis PhD Student Jin Zhao, CL MS’20, wins People’s Choice Award at Brandeis Three Minute Thesis Competition
April 4, 2025 – CL News
Jin Zhao, CL MS’20 and current PhD student specializing in CL/NLP in Professor Nianwen Xue’s lab, has won the People’s Choice Award for her presentation on her PhD thesis at the Brandeis Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition! Many congratulations, Jin!
Fall 2025 Pre-Registration and Courses Info Session
April 4, 2025 – CL MS Advising Info Sessions
CL MS Director of Graduate Studies Professor Sophia Malamud will go over detailed info on the course offerings – including an advanced elective on Automated Speech Recognition, along with a range of other options from CL, CS, and Linguistics – and answer all your questions on registration and degree requirements for the Fall 2025 term. All continuing students should attend!
Spring 2025 CL/NLP Industry Reception
March 20, 2025 – CL/NLP Career Events
We held our Spring 2025 CL/NLP Industry Reception on March 20, 2025, and want to send our sincere thanks to the representatives who work in CL/NLP at local companies and non-profits who took the time to travel to campus to meet with our CL MS students, as well as some additional CL-specialized CS PhD students, advanced CL undergraduates, and CL alumni!
We thank in particular the CL/NLP specialists who visited from:
- Amazon
- Babel Street
- Boston Children's Hospital
- Charles River Analytics
- Pryon
- SIFT
More information about our industry receptions can be found on the Professional Development and Industry Connections page of our website.
Spring 2025 CL/NLP Industry Reception Prep Session #2
March 14, 2025 – CL MS Career Development Info Sessions
Come to the second of our two CL/NLP Industry Reception Prep Sessions, led by CL MS Career Advisor Prof. Constantine Lignos, so that you’ll be well prepared for next week’s Industry Reception. Co-CL/NLP Industry Liaison Prof. Lotus Goldberg will also go over the logistics of the reception, and pass on tips from students and alumni in prior years for getting the most out of the reception, toward making progress on your career goals.
Spring 2025 CL/NLP Industry Reception Prep Session #1
February 28, 2025 – CL MS Career Development Info Sessions
Come to the first of our two CL/NLP Industry Reception Prep Sessions, led by CL MS Career Advisor Prof. Constantine Lignos, so that you’ll be well prepared for next week’s Industry Reception. Prof. Lignos will also cover strategies for the job interview and negotiation process, which is all helpful knowledge to have moving forward from the reception.
Colloquium by Professor Katrin Erk, University of Texas at Austin
Monday February 24 - CS and CL/NLP Events
Professor Katrin Erk of the Linguistics Department and Computer Science Department of the University of Texas at Austin gave a talk in the Computer Science Department Speaker Series entitled “What Do Word Token Embeddings Tell us About Lexical Semantics?”
Abstract
We can think of word token embeddings as a condensed record of utterances of many speakers. Which raises the question of how we can probe into word meaning in context using word embeddings. Can word embeddings tell us about the structure of polysemous words, and which properties distinguish different usage groups? Can word embeddings help us answer specific questions, for example about the subtle meaning changes that particular constructions impose on their components? In this talk I discuss methods that we have been developing for studying lexical semantics through embeddings, and analyses we've done so far.
CL Community Potluck
January 31, 2025 – CL Events
The CL students are organizing a community potluck, including for celebrating Lunar New Year! Come and hang out to relax after a long week, and enjoy lots of delicious treats – many homemade!
Welcome Back Pizza Party
January 17, 2025 – CL Events
CL community welcome back pizza party to celebrate the end of the semester’s first week of classes – all are welcome!
Welcome Back for Spring 2025 & Congratulations to our February Graduates!
January 14, 2025 – CL News
A warm welcome back for the Spring semester – which begins today – and happy 2025! We’re looking forward to a great semester.
We also extend a warm congratulations and lots of good wishes for success and happiness to our upcoming February graduates, who completed their degree requirements last December 2024!
Professor James Pustejovsky selected as ACL Fellow for 2024
December 11, 2024 – CL News
We are thrilled to announce that Professor James Pustejovsky, the TJX Feldberg Professor of Computer Science and Chair of the Computational Linguistics and Linguistics Programs, was selected as an ACL Fellow for 2024 by the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) Nominating Committee. In this major career achievement, James was recognized for his significant contributions to computational semantics and predicate argument structures and the formalization of lexical, spatial and temporal relations.
Many congratulations, James!
Spring 2025 Pre-Registration and Courses Info Session
November 15, 2024 – CL MS Academic Advising Info Sessions
Come and hear about the various course offerings, Exit Requirements, and all other info that CL MS students will need to register for the Spring 2025 Semester!
CL MS & PhD Students and Alumni Present at EMNLP
November 14, 2024 – CL News: Conference Presentations
Brandeis CL MS and CL PhD students and alumni regularly present posters and talks at CL/NLP conferences, nationally and internationally. Brandeis was well represented by multiple CL students and alumni at the recent annual Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), in Miami, Florida.
Advanced CL MS student Sonny George presented the poster “Probing the Capacity of Language Model Agents to Operationalize Disparate Experiential Context Despite Distraction”, a collaboration with Chris Sypherd and Brandeis CS Professor Dylan Cashman. The work was also accepted to EMNLP 2024 Findings, and introduces a novel benchmark for testing a language agent’s ability to operationalize information from past experience despite trivial distraction, across a variety of plausible scenarios for AI assistants.
CL MS alumni Jingxuan Tu, CL MS’19 and Jin Zhao, CL MS’20, both current Brandeis CS PhD students specializing in CL/NLP, presented the poster “Media Attitude Detection via Framing Analysis with Events and their Relations”, joint work with advanced CL MS student Han Du and CL and CS faculty member Nianwen Xue. The paper investigates media framing of events in news articles, constructing a comprehensive model of the narrative that allows a more detailed and explainable analysis of how media frames events than was previously possible.
While there, Sonny, Jingxuan, and Jin also caught up with numerous program alumni. Among them were:
- Hayley Ross, CL MS’20, now a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Harvard University, who presented the joint paper with Kathryn Davidson and Najoung Kimjoint “Is Artificial Intelligence Still Intelligence? LLMs Generalize to Novel Adjective-Noun Pairs, but Don’t Mimic the Full Human Distribution” at the Second Workshop on Generalisation (Benchmarking) in NLP (GenBench);
- Nikhil Krishnaswamy, CL MA’13, CS PhD’17, CS Postdoc’17-’20, now an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Colorado State University, who was part of the joint paper by Abhijnan Nath et al., “‘Any Other Thoughts, Hedgehog?’ Linking Deliberation Chains in Collaborative Dialogues, as well as the joint paper with Sadaf Ghaffari Large Language Models Are Challenged by Habitat-Centered Reasoning.
Congratulations to all!
Colloquium by Hayley Ross, CL MS Alum & Harvard PhD Student
November 8, 2024 – CL and Ling Events
We are excited to welcome back Hayley Ross, CL MS’20, currently a PhD student in Linguistics at Harvard University, who will give a talk in our Linguistics and Computational Linguistics Colloquium Series titled “Is Artificial Intelligence Still Intelligence? Measuring Adjective-Noun Inferences in Humans and LLMs.”
Abstract
How do we compose adjectives with nouns to get composite meanings? Inferences from adjective-noun combinations like “Is artificial intelligence still intelligence?” not only shed light on human composition, but also provide a nice test bed for LLMs' understanding of meaning and compositional generalization capability, since there are many combinations which are novel to both humans and LLMs but nevertheless elicit convergent human judgments. We test nearly 800 adjective-noun bigrams, of which 180 are presumed novel (zero frequency in an LLM pretraining corpus) and show that for humans, these inferences depend on the adjective, the noun and the context, if one is provided. We then study a range of LLMs and find that the largest models we tested are able to draw human-like inferences when the inference is determined by context. They are also able to generalize to unseen adjective-noun bigrams. Finally, we investigate two methods to evaluate LLMs on these inferences out of context, where there is a distribution of human-like answers rather than a single correct answer. We find that LLMs show a human-like distribution on at most 75% of our dataset, with no difference between high frequency and novel bigrams, which is promising but still leaves room for improvement.
Strategies for Success in the CL MS Program
November 1, 2024 – CL MS Advising Info Sessions
Come to the CL MS advising information session: Strategies for Success in the Program, featuring helpful tips from CL MS advisors and a panel of advanced CL MS students.
Interview with CL MS Alum Josh Broderick Phillips
October 28, 2024 – CL Alumni Profiles
Josh Broderick Phillips, CL MS’24 and Professor Lotus Goldberg were interviewed by the Brandeis Graduate School of Arts and Sciences about Josh’s work as head research assistant on Prof. Goldberg’s research project building a large dataset of the verb phrase ellipsis construction in multiple varieties of English, with detailed syntactic labeling. The feature can be found here.
Info Session on Getting Involved in Research & Preparing for Future PhD Studies
October 25, 2024 – CL MS Advising Info Sessions
Come to part two of our CL MS advising info session on getting involved in research in the program's labs, and preparing for possible PhD study.
Fall 2024 CL/NLP Industry Reception
October 22, 2024 – CL/NLP Career Events
Our Fall 2024 CL/NLP Industry Reception, held on October 22, 2024, was a great success! Representatives from 13 companies and organizations visited campus to speak and make connections with approximately our CL MS students, along with some additional CL-specialized CS PhD students, advanced CL undergraduates, and CL alumni.
More information about our industry receptions can be found on the Professional Development and Industry Connections page of our website.
Lots of thanks from all of us to the representatives from the following companies and organizations who took time to come and meet with our students!
- Babel Street
- BBN Technologies
- CallMiner
- Charles River Analytics
- Fidelity
- Mango Languages
- MITRE
- Poly AI
- Pryon
- SIFT
- University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
- University of Massachusetts Amherst Center for Data Science
- Walmart Advanced Systems and Robotics
Fall 2024 CL/NLP Industry Reception Prep Session #2
October 18, 2024 – CL MS Career Development Info Sessions
Come to the second of our two CL/NLP Industry Reception Prep Sessions, led by CL MS Career Advisor Professor Constantine Lignos, so that you’ll be well prepared for next week’s Industry Reception.
Colloquium by Linguistics Alum Madison Hunter
October 2, 2024 – Linguistics and CL Events
Madison Hunter, PhD, Linguistics BA’17, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, gave a talk on their work in forensic linguistics, as part of the Linguistics Colloquium Series. Madi graduated from Brandeis with a double major in Linguistics and Psychology, and went on to complete a Master's Degree in Forensic Linguistics at Hofstra University in New York in 2019, and a PhD in Forensic Linguistics from Aston University in the UK in 2022. It was wonderful to welcome Madi back to campus, and to hear about their research in this very interesting area!
CL/NLP Resume Guidance & Preparation Session with Marika McCann of GSAS
October 1, 2024 – CL MS Career Development Info Sessions
As part of our CL MS Professional Development series to help you prepare for the upcoming CL/NLP Industry Reception, Marika McCann, Associate Director of Professional Development and Employer Outreach at Brandeis GSAS, will hold a Resume Guidance and Prep Pession for all CL MS students.
CL and Linguistics Reunion
September 28, 2024 – CL and Ling Events
It was wonderful to see the roughly 30 undergraduate Linguistics, CL MS, and CL/NLP-specialized CS PhD alumni who returned to campus for the joint Linguistics and Computational Linguistics reunion, held as part of the Computer Science Department reunion during Brandeis' Alumni Weekend! Everyone had a great time catching up, and many alumni got to meet not only those from their own cohorts, but also alumni from other years. Thanks so much to everyone who made the event such a warm and enjoyable afternoon!
Fall 2024 CL/NLP Industry Reception Prep Session #1
September 27, 2024 – CL MS Career Development Info Sessions
Come to the first of our two CL/NLP Industry Reception Prep Sessions, led by CL MS Career Advisor Prof. Constantine Lignos, so that you’ll be well prepared for next week’s Industry Reception.
Info Session on Getting Involved in Research and Preparing for Potential PhD Studies
September 20, 2024 – CL MS Advising Info Sessions
Professor Lotus Goldberg, CL MS Vice Chair and advisor, gave an info session for CL MS students on getting involved in research in the program's labs, and preparing for possible PhD study – with lots of useful tips and advice.
Student Panel on Summer Internship and RA Work by Returning CL MS Students
September 13, 2024 – CL MS Career Development Info Sessions
Come and hear about the work that returning CL MS students did in their industry internships and RA work over this past summer!
Congratulations, August Graduates!
August 31, 2024 – CL and Ling News
We wish a heartfelt congratulations and lots of wishes for success to our August Linguistics BA and CL MS graduates! We look forward to keeping in touch and welcoming you back for future reunions and alumni events!
Welcome (Back) Pizza Party
August 30, 2024 – CL Events
It was lovely to see everyone and celebrate the end of the first week of classes at today’s welcome back pizza party for the Brandeis CL community! We all enjoyed welcoming our new CL MS students and CL-specialized PhD students, welcoming back the returning CL MS and and CL-specialized CS PhD students, and getting to relax and have some pizza after the first week of classes. Here’s to a great year ahead!