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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) Dialects of Translationese Shape Language Model Learning Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, p. 48640-48659, Article 2272 (Conference paper) https://dx.doi.org/10.18653/2026.findings-emnlp.2272
Romina Oji, Marc Braun, Marcel Bollmann, Marco Kuhlmann, Jenny Kunz (2026) Probing Factual Knowledge Transfer with Training Data Interventions (Conference paper) https://dx.doi.org/10.18653/2026.emnlp-main.2445
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

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