Event
Pre-ACL 2025 Workshop
Location
Date
Organizer
About
The Pre-ACL Workshop in Copenhagen aims to strengthen the Danish NLP community by connecting it with global leaders in the field. ACL, the oldest and largest international conference on NLP, will take place in Vienna, Austria this year. This presents a unique opportunity to bring international experts closer to the local Danish community to foster knowledge exchange, future collaborations, and innovation through discussions on cutting-edge advancements in language technology.
The workshop is supported by the Danish Data Science Academy, as well as the Pioneer Centre for AI.
The programme will combine different formats – talks, poster sessions and round-table discussions – offering direct engagement in an intimate setting with global leaders to help spark new ideas and promote networking and collaboration.
The target group consists of researchers and practitioners in the areas of Natural Language Processing, Generative AI and Language Technology.
Participants of any seniority and from academia as well as industry are welcome to attend.
Registration
Attendance and registration are free of charge, but limited spots are available due to space constraints.
It is possible to attend as an ordinary attendee or as a poster presenter.
The deadline for general sign-up is 5 July 2025. Attendees are invited to submit a poster presentation proposal as part of the registration procedure by 16 June 2025, and will be informed of the outcome of their submissions by 23 June 2025. In addition to the keynote talks, poster presenters will be invited to join round-table discussions, lunch and dinner on the day of the workshop, as well as a pre-workshop social on 25 July, and can apply for financial support for travel and accommodation to attend the workshop.
Sign up here
Schedule
25 July
16.00-18.00 Social event: Canal Tour
26 July
08.30-09.00 Onesite registration, poster setup & coffee (P1)
09.00-09.15 Opening remarks (Natural History Museum)
09.15-10.45 3 Invited talks & joint discussion (Natural History Museum)
10.45-11.15 Coffee break
11.15-12.45 3 Invited talks & joint discussion (Natural History Museum)
12.45-13.45 Roundtable lunch discussions (P1)
13.45-14.45 Poster session (P1)
14.45-15.15 Coffee break
15.15-16.45 3 Invited talks & joint discussion (Natural History Museum)
16.45-17.00 Closing remarks & poster awards (Natural History Museum)
18.00-20.00 Dinner & networking nearby
Invited speakers
- Thamar Solorio, Professor at MBZUAI: Thamar Solorio is a professor in the NLP department at MBZUAI where she also serves as Senior Director of Graduate Student Education and Postdoctoral Affairs. Her research interests include NLP for low-resource settings and multilingual data, including code-switching and information extraction. More recently, she has been exploring language and vision problems, focusing on developing inclusive NLP. She served two terms as an elected board member of the North American Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics (NAACL) and was PC co-chair for NAACL 2019, and recently stepped down from being co-Editor in Chief of the ACL Rolling Review Initiative (ARR). She was the general chair of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).
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Smaranda Muresan, Associate Professor at Columbia University: Smaranda Muresan is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Computer Science at Barnard College, Columbia University and a member of the Data Science Institute at Columbia University. Before joining Barnard in 2024, she was a Research Scientist at the Data Science Institute at Columbia University. Her research focuses on human-centric Natural Language Processing for social good and responsible computing. She develops theory-guided and knowledge-aware computational models for understanding and generating language in context (e.g., visual, social, multilingual, multicultural) with applications to computational social science, education, public health and creativity support. Recently, her research interests include explainable models and human-AI collaboration frameworks. She served as a board member for the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) 2020-2021, as a co-founder and co-chair of the New York Academy of Sciences’ Annual Symposium on NLP/Dialog/Speech (2019-2020) and as a Program Co-Chair for SIGDIAL 2020 and ACL 2022.
- David Jurgens, Associate Professor at the University of Michigan: David Jurgens is an associate professor jointly in the School of Information and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. His research is at the intersection of natural language processing and computational social science.
- Nanyun Peng, Assistant Professor at UCLA
- Danish Pruthi, Assistant Professor at IISc Bangalore: Danish Pruthi is an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. He received his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is broadly interested in the areas of natural language processing and deep learning, with a focus towards inclusive development and evaluation of AI models. He completed his bachelors degree in computer science from BITS Pilani, Pilani. He is also a recipient of the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellowship, Siebel Scholarship, the CMU Presidential Fellowship and industry awards from Google and Adobe Inc. Until recently, his legal name was only Danish—an “edge case” for many deployed NLP systems, leading to airport quagmires and, in equal parts, funny anecdotes.
- Kai-Wei Chang, Associate Professor at UCLA and Amazon Scholar at Alexa AI: Kai-Wei Chang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UCLA and an Amazon Scholar at Amazon AGI. His research interests include designing trustworthy natural language processing systems and developing multimodal models for vision-language applications. Kai-Wei has published broadly in NLP, AI, and ML. His awards include IEEE AI’s 10 to Watch (2024), the Sloan Fellow (2021), AAAI Senior Member (2023), CVPR Best Paper Finalist (2022), EMNLP Best Long Paper Award (2017), and KDD Best Paper Award (2010). Kai-Wei was elected as an officer of SIGDAT, the organizing body behind EMNLP, and will serve as President in 2026. He is an associate editor for journals such as JAIR, JMLR, TACL, and ARR and senior area chair for most ML and NLP conferences. He has delivered multiple tutorials on topics such as Fairness, Robustness, and Multimodal NLP at EMNLP (2019, 2021) and ACL (2023). Kai-Wei received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015 and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research in 2016. For more details, visit http://kwchang.net.
- Mausam, Professor at IIT Delhi: Mausam is a Professor of Computer Science and founding head of Yardi School of AI at IIT Delhi, along with being an affiliate professor at University of Washington, Seattle. He has over 100 archival papers, a book, two best paper awards, and an ACL test of time award to his credit. He has been a PC Chair for AAAI, is currently an Editor-in-Chief for ARR, and was recently elected as a AAAI Fellow.
- Anjalie Field, Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University: Anjalie Field is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Johns Hopkins University. She is also affiliated with the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) and the new Data Science and AI Institute. Her research focuses on the ethics and social science aspects of natural language processing, which includes developing models to address societal issues like discrimination and propaganda, as well as critically assessing and improving ethics in AI pipelines. Her work has been published in NLP and interdisciplinary venues, like ACL and PNAS, and in 2024 she was named an AI2050 Early Career Fellow by Schmidt Futures. Prior to joining JHU, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, and she completed her PhD at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
- Tanu Mitra, Associate Professor at University of Washington: Tanu Mitra is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington, Information School, where she leads the Social Computing and ALgorithmic Experiences (SCALE) lab group. Her research combines computational techniques and social science principles to study complex social processes underlying human behavior in large-scale online social systems. Her current research focus is on understanding and designing defenses against problematic information in generative AI technologies, and in online social platforms and the algorithms driving them. Tanu’s work employs a range of interdisciplinary methods from the fields of human computer interaction, machine learning, and natural language processing. Her work has been supported by grants from the NSF, NIH, DoD, and several foundations and industry grants. Her research has been recognized through multiple awards and honors, including an NSF-CAREER, NSF-CRII, an early career ONR-YIP and Adamic-Glance Distinguished Young Researcher award, along with several best paper awards. Dr. Mitra received her PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing.
Organisers
- Isabelle Augenstein, Professor at the University og Copenhagen and P1 Co-Lead
- Pepa Atanasova, Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen
- Arnav Arora, PhD student at the University of Copenhagen
- Dustin Wright, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Copenhagen
- Yoonna Jang, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Copenhagen