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Jenny Kunz

Postdoc

Research interests: Parameter-efficient language adaptation, interpretability, explainability and modularisation of NLP models.

Interpretable and explainable NLP

Many current Natural Language Processing (NLP) models are large neutral networks that are pre-trained on huge amounts of unlabeled data. How these models store, combine and use information from this self-supervised training is still largely obscure. I develop techniques that probe how linguistic information is structured within the model, and what the limitations of current models are.

Another research interest of mine are self-rationalizing models that generate free-text explanations along with their predictions. While textual explanations are flexible and easy to understand, they come with challenges such as a speculative relation to the prediction and the inheritance of possibly undesirable properties of human explanations, such as the ability to convincingly justify wrong predictions. I work on the evaluation and control of such explanations, and on the relation between explanation design and utility.

PhD thesis

CV in brief

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Humboldt University of Berlin (2016).
  • Master’s degree in Language Technology from Uppsala University (2018).
  • PhD Student at LiU (2019-2024)
    Postdoc at LiU (since 2024)​
  • Teaching: Language and Computers (729G49).
    Previous: Text Mining, Language Technology, Natural Language Processing, Neural Networks and Deep Learning, Foundations of AI and ML.

Publications

2026

Jenny Kunz (2026) Preferences for Idiomatic Language are Acquired Slowly - and Forgotten Quickly: A Case Study on Swedish Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Vol. 14, p. 1266-1285 (Article in journal) https://dx.doi.org/10.1162/tacl.a.727
Jenny Kunz (2026) A Diagnostic Benchmark for Sweden-Related Factual Knowledge Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026) (Conference paper)
Jenny Kunz, Anja Jarochenko, Marcel Bollmann (2026) A Dataset for Probing Translationese Preferences in English-to-Swedish Translation Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026) (Conference paper) https://dx.doi.org/10.63317/2dj5zcpvjwf2

2025

Jenny Kunz (2025) Train More Parameters But Mind Their Placement: Insights into Language Adaptation with PEFT Proceedings of the Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025), p. 323-330, Article 35 (Conference paper)
Julian Schlenker, Jenny Kunz, Tatiana Anikina, Günther Neumann, Simon Ostermann (2025) Only for the Unseen Languages, Say the Llamas: On the Efficacy of Language Adapters for Cross-lingual Transfer in English-centric LLMs Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), p. 849-871 (Conference paper) https://dx.doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.acl-srw.62

About the division

Colleagues at AIICS

About the department