Joris Baan

PhD Candidate Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing

I am an ELLIS PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam working with Wilker Aziz, Barbara Plank and Raquel Fernández.

I am interested in understanding how large language models represent uncertainty, and if we can disentangle uncertainty that arises from the data (e.g., underspecified, subjective or ambiguous language) from uncertainty related to a model (e.g., lack of knowledge or reasoning). Ultimately, I think that uncertainty should power better decision-making.

I am part of the Dialogue Modeling Group in Amsterdam and MaiNLP at LMU in Munich. Previously, I interned at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle and spent a few years as ML engineer at DPG Media working on large scale news recommendation.

News

  • December 2023 - I presented our “What Comes Next” paper as an oral talk at EMNLP in Singapore.
  • November 2023 - I am teaching assistant for two master AI courses at the UvA: NLP1 and DL1.
  • October 2023 - We’re organising the First Workshop on Uncertainty-aware NLP (UncertaiNLP), co-located with EACL in Malta! Check out the website at https://uncertainlp.github.io/ and consider submitting your work!
  • October 2023 - One paper accepted at EMNLP (main conference): camera ready coming soon!
  • August 2023 - New preprint! “Uncertainty in Natural Language Generation: From Theory to Applications”
  • July 2023 - Super excited to join AllenAI in Seattle as a research intern to work with Sarah Wiegreffe!
  • May 2023 - New preprint! “What Comes Next? Evaluating Uncertainty in Neural Text Generators Against Human Production Variability”
  • December 2022 - I am presenting our EMNLP paper as an oral talk in the interpretability track in Abu Dhabi.
  • November 2022 - Teaching assistant for the MSc AI course Deep Learning 1.
  • Oct 2022 - New EMNLP paper: Stop Measuring Calibration When Humans Disagree! Find the preprint here and a summary on twitter here.
  • Sept 2022 - Presented a poster at the ELLIS Machine Learning Symposium in Alicante, Spain.
  • April 2022 - Attended REST-CL in Barcelona, Spain.
  • March 2022 - Guest lecture “Introduction to Transformers”, second year Data Science BSc students at the IT University of Copenhagen.
  • February 2022 - Three months research visit in the NLPnorth group at the IT University of Copenhagen.
  • November 2021 - Teaching assistant for the MSc AI course NLP 1.
  • October 2021 - Started my PhD in the Dialogue Modeling Group at the University of Amsterdam.

Blogposts

Occasionally I write blogposts. You can find them below.