Leonie Weissweiler

📢I'm hiring a PhD student to work on interpretability for Protein Language Models! 🗓️There are now two weeks left to apply, find out more on the LION Lab website: lionlabnlp.github.io/jobs/ai4pf/

Hi everyone! I'd like to share the preprint of BLiMPPI, our joint work with @annarogers.bsky.social, @weissweiler.bsky.social, Joakim Nivre and Rob van der Goot: 12,866 minimal pairs for negative polarity items and negative concord items in 33 languages. 1/🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2610.13607

Great news! Our workshop what-llms-can-not-do.org is going to COLING 2027 in Macau! Hope to see you there!

🏹 Job alert: PhD student position in Interpretability for Protein Language Models at Leipzig University 📍 Leipzig 🇩🇪 ⏰ 15 October 🔗 https://bit.ly/3V63Gpm

Ever feel like it's too hard to keep track of what LLMs cannot do as well as humans? We're making your life easier over at: what-llms-can-not-do.github.io We're compiling a list of papers testing the abilities of LLMs against humans. Check it out! And you can help contribute too!

🦁LION Lab is hiring! 🧑‍🔬One fully funded PhD student (TVL-13 100%) for 3 years 💉Topic: Interpretability for Protein Language Models 👥Advised by @weissweiler.bsky.social together with Clara Schoeder 🌍Leipzig, Germany 🔗Apply by Oct 15: lionlabnlp.github.io/jobs/ai4pf/ Please share! #NLProc #NLP

#COLING2027 has joined forces with #EACL2027 and #NAACL2027 for the call for tutorials! 📢Joint Call for Tutorial Proposals (EACL/NAACL/COLING) 2027 🗓️Submission deadline: Friday, 2 October 2026 📝Submit via softconf: softconf.com/p/eacl-tutor... 🔗Full call here: 2027.coling-iccl.org/calls/tutori...

We hope to see the UniDivers again soon in other settings 😊 Fun fact: the old town of Bucharest has been called the Lipscani District since the 17th century, because most of the wares sold on the high street at the time originated from Leipzig!

It was great seeing everyone again at the last Unidive General Meeting in Bucharest! Jacob Lee Suchardt presented a poster about his EMNLP 2025 paper on the Transcription of Unseen Languages with Speech-to-IPA Models, and we celebrated the past four years of UniDive and all the friends we made.

Yesterday we had @anja.re from Technion visiting us to give a talk on Interpretability for Generative Information Retrieval. The talk was a cool example to show that interpretability can also be actionable. Thank you very much for joining us, Anja!

🗣️Today we had the pleasure of hosting @bbunzeck.bsky.social for a talk on how LLMs are not usage-based (yet). We learned a lot about the challenges of training smaller language models on dialogue data and evaluating from a production-based perspective. Thanks for coming, Bastian!

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!

Congratulations Leonie! Hear her roar!

🥳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

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-...

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

@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....

🥳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!

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".

I can confirm that I was indeed the 2nd author!

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

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-)

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.

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

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

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!

Happening now! Poster 42!

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

📢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!