Desmond Elliott

EMNLP 2026 is shaping up to be the largest NLP conference in Europe this year! Put your brand in front of leading AI & NLP talent to build visibility, recruiting, and partnerships with the people shaping the field. ⏰ Deadline: September 15 🔗 2026.emnlp.org/sponsors/ #EMNLP2026

Registration for #EMNLP2026 is officially open! 🇭🇺 Authors, please note registration deadlines: Sept 11 (Main) and Sept 24 (Workshops). You can find all the details under the Accepted Paper Information on the registration page. 🔗 2026.emnlp.org/registration/

✨ We are thrilled to announce that 5,252 papers have been accepted to #EMNLP2026 ✨ This includes over 2,700 main conference papers and over 2,500 papers in findings! Congratulations to all authors!! 🎉🎉🎉

Lets assume a year or two from now arxiv / conferences have 10x the paper submissions they currently have. This isn't implausible; it is now trivial to generate true but trivial things. What's the appropriate solution?

🎉 We are incredibly excited to announce the Keynote Speakers for #EMNLP2026: Pascale Fung, Graham Neubig, and Anna Korhonen! See you in October in Budapest! 🔗 2026.emnlp.org/program/keyn...

🚨 Call for #EMNLP2026 Student Volunteers Volunteer for 10 hours and receive FREE conference registration Both in-person and virtual roles are available 📅 Deadline: September 1 📢 Decisions: September 9 🔗 Link: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... More info: 2026.emnlp.org/calls/volunt...

📢 ARR May 2026 update Metareviews will be released by the end of July 30 (AoE). We have received 99.6% and are working hard to collect the final 0.4%. Please bear with us! #ARR #ACL #AACL #EMNLP #NLProc

Regular reminder that we have an alt-ARR slack workspace where ACs and SACs can support each other through the sometimes confusing process of the ARR cycle! Post or DM me a good email address for a Slack invitation and I will add you. #EMNLP2026

Brief update on the progress of the #EMNLP2026 AI Reviewing Experiment and a timeline for releasing the AI reviews to opted-in authors 2026.emnlp.org/ai-reviewing...

⚠️ Submitting to #EMNLP2026? Make sure to review our newly published Paper Integrity Policy first! It includes important updates on Generative Assistance in Authorship, thinly sliced contributions, and unverifiable references. 🔗 Details: 2026.emnlp.org/paper-integr...

Submitting to ARR for #EMNLP2026? We're running an opt-in AI Reviewing Experiment. Help us test AI-generated reviews during your ARR submission. 🤖 ✅ Reviewers, ACs, and SACs will not be able to see it ✅ Will not affect decisions 🔗 Read more: 2026.emnlp.org/ai-reviewing...

📢 The First Call for Papers for EMNLP 2026 is officially out! 📝 We welcome long & short papers featuring original research on empirical methods for NLP. 🗓️ ARR Submission Deadline: May 25, 2026 🔗 Read the full CFP here: 2026.emnlp.org/calls/main_c... #EMNLP2026

🚨New paper Are visual tokens going into an LLM interpretable 🤔 Existing methods (e.g. logit lens) and assumptions would lead you to think “not much”... We propose LatentLens and show that most visual tokens are interpretable across *all* layers 💡 Details 🧵

📢 I am hiring a highly-motivated Ph.D student at the University of Copenhagen to work on tokenization-free NLP. Read our previous work in this topic: aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-m... aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-m... openreview.net/forum?id=FkS... Apply by March 8: employment.ku.dk/phd/?show=1563

📄 [ACL 2025 main] LLMs instead of Human Judges? A Large Scale Empirical Study across 20 NLP Evaluation Tasks (doi.org/10.48550/arX...)

Three invited speakers will share their insights at TokShop! Hear from Yuval Pinter @uvp.bsky.social, Desmond Elliott @delliott.bsky.social, and Adrian Łańcuck on cutting-edge tokenization research. Don't miss these keynote presentations! #ICML2025 tokenization-workshop.github.io/speakers

It is with great pleasure that I share MAXMINDS 2.0, a new Max Planck program to support scholars in danger of displacement by war or natural disasters, and who have limited access to resources and institutional support. If you know affected scholars, please share. www.maxminds.mpg.de

📢I am hiring a Postdoc to work on post-training methods for low-resource languages. Apply by August 15 employment.ku.dk/faculty/?sho.... Let's talk at #ACL2025NLP in Vienna if you want to know more about the position and life in Denmark.

💡Beyond math/code, instruction following with verifiable constraints is suitable to be learned with RLVR. But the set of constraints and verifier functions is limited and most models overfit on IFEval. We introduce IFBench to measure model generalization to unseen constraints.

📣 I am happy to support Ph.D applications to the Danish Advanced Research Academy. My main areas of research include multimodal learning and tokenization-free language processing. Feel free to reach out if you have similar interests! Applications due August 29 www.daracademy.dk/fellowship/f...

Following #CVPR2025, #ICCV2025 implemented a new policy targeting accountability and integrity. PCs identified 25 highly irresponsible reviewers, resulting in the desk rejection of 29 associated papers, including 12 submissions that otherwise would have been accepted.

Thought-provoking interview with Meg about “AGI”

📯 Best Paper Award at CVPR workshop on Visual concepts for our (@doneata.bsky.social + @delliott.bsky.social) paper on probing vision/lang/ vision+lang models for semantic norms! TLDR: SSL vision models (swinV2, dinoV2) are surprisingly similar to LLM & VLMs even w/o lang 👀 arxiv.org/abs/2506.03994

I am looking forward to meeting people working on multimodality at #CVPR2025. You can find me hopping between the @vlms4all.bsky.social and Visual Concepts Workshops on Thursday. Feel free to reach out if you want to grab a coffee ☕ or a beer 🍻 during the week!

Announcing our recent work “Multilingual Pretraining for Pixel Language Models”! We introduce PIXEL-M4, a pixel language model pretrained on four visually & linguistically diverse scripts: English, Hindi, Ukrainian & Simplified Chinese. #NLProc

I am excited to announce our latest work 🎉 "Cultural Evaluations of Vision-Language Models Have a Lot to Learn from Cultural Theory". We review recent works on culture in VLMs and argue for deeper grounding in cultural theory to enable more inclusive evaluations. Paper 🔗: arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22793

Interested in multilingual tokenization in #NLP? Lisa Beinborn and I are hiring! PhD candidate position in Göttingen, Germany: www.uni-goettingen.de/de/644546.ht... PostDoc position in Leuven, Belgium: www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo... Deadline 6th of June

Has anyone written anything about *scraping and text processing* for internet pretraining data? Practical details, which tools are used, which webpage elements are considered, how HTML to text conversion is done? (I know about work on quality filters, relevant but not quite what I'm looking for)

Had fun talking at the Spurious Correlations & Shortcut Learning at ICLR! One example I brought up, which I think provides an uncommon perspective: a case where spurious shortcuts can improve generalization... even to out-of-distribution sets where the spurious feature doesn't generalize! Thread:

What would you do if someone has rolled your dataset into their benchmark (cool!) but marked it as being available under a much more permissive license (not so cool)?

I'm recruiting a postdoc on an 18-month contract candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI.... The position is about deploying LLMs in the Danish public sector. This is an interdisciplinary project that touches on technical, ethical, and legal aspects of LLM usage. Apply by 1 May 2025.

Very excited to release Kaleidoscope—a multilingual, multimodal evaluation set for VLMs, built as part of our open-science initiative! 🌍 18 languages (high-, mid-, low-) 📚 21k questions (55% require image understanding) 🧪 STEM, social science, reasoning, and practical skills

🚀 We are excited to introduce Kaleidoscope, the largest culturally-authentic exam benchmark. 📌 Most VLM benchmarks are English-centric or rely on translations—missing linguistic & cultural nuance. Kaleidoscope expands in-language multilingual 🌎 & multimodal 👀 VLMs evaluation

I'm really excited about this new benchmark for VLMs! It was great to do this as part of an open-science initiative and to meet so many great people.

📢Excited to announce our upcoming workshop - Vision Language Models For All: Building Geo-Diverse and Culturally Aware Vision-Language Models (VLMs-4-All) @CVPR 2025! 🌐 sites.google.com/view/vlms4all

Announcing a new event initiative: Feminist AI LAN Party! Katharine and I did a pilot event last year and we're now taking it to @pyconde.bsky.social. We've also open-sourced event kits to make it easy to host your own, including: 💣 hacking LLMs 📑 data development ✂️ zine making feministai.party

Would you present your next NeurIPS paper in Europe instead of traveling to San Diego (US) if this was an option? Søren Hauberg (DTU) and I would love to hear the answer through this poll: (1/6)

I'm also desperately looking for emergency reviewers for safety, bias, and alignment papers. Please let me know if you could write a review! 😭

Can anyone point me at concrete examples of the value being created by Large Language Models right now in 2025?

Inspired by languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68451 , I asked Claude for elephant-free rooms and honestly got much more than I expected

🌍 Join us in Copenhagen - fantastic city for work-life balance and awesome science. I am hiring PhD students & Postdocs in my group at SODAS Univ of Copenhagen to explore AI, network science & the science of science. 📍 Start: flex summer 2025 📌 Info&Apply: www.robertasinatra.com/2025/03/02/p...

I was reading a preprint from this week and I noticed, upon closer inspection, that 41/49 of the citations are from 2023--. It seems like the observation we made in 2020 (aclanthology.org/2020.acl-mai...) is becoming even more extreme in 2025.

Finland is making a significant investment in the future of machine learning / artificial intelligence by hiring 20 professors (at various levels) www.ellisinstitute.fi/ellis-instit...

🚨 Preprint alert 🚨 𝐂𝐚𝐧 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐍𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐑𝐞𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐅𝐚𝐜𝐭-𝐂𝐡𝐞𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐫𝐬? (arxiv.org/abs/2502.14132) Fact-checking agencies have come under intense scrutiny in recent months regarding their role in combating misinformation on social media.