Malvina Nissim

I work in Natural Language Processing and its application to societally relevant problems. Besides my research activities I am particularly active in science communication and outreach, including to school children, especially towards an aware and responsible use of language technologies. I really enjoy public speaking, and once I got to give a TEDx talk. I was also invited by the European Council to give a plenary lecture on gender bias in Artificial Intelligence on International Women’s Day 2021. As a university professor I teach quite a bit, and I love it - proud to be elected as the 2016 University of Groningen Lecturer of the Year.

I am PC Chair for EACL 2027

I am the coordinator of the Sectorplan’s theme Humane AI at the University of Groningen

I am a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Jantina Tammes School for Digital Society, Technology, and AI at the University of Groningen

I was a member of the board of AILC, the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (2019-2025)

I was a member of the ACL Ethics Committee (2022-2024)

News and Recent Events

I will deliver a keynote at INLG in Utrecht, October 2026.
I am just back from CLiC-it 2026 in Palermo, where we presented the following papers:
- Malvina Nissim Language, Language Models, and What We’re Talking About, a position paper I particularly care about.
- Sara Candussio, Francesca Padovani, Daniel Scalena, Malvina Nissim. “Don’t Say It!”: Constraints, Compliance, and Communication when Language Models Play Taboo
- Cristiano Ciaccio, Asya Zanollo, Alessio Miaschi, Gabriele Sarti, Felice Dell’Orletta, Malvina Nissim. Reading Between the Clues: A Fine-Grained Analysis of Italian Crossword Solving Systems
At the beginning of September I participated for the first time in the IEEE Conference on Games, CoG 2026 in Madrid, where I presented work on LLMs solving Dr Denker rebuses!
CALAMITA is published in IJCOL, the Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics! I coordinated the large-scale collaborative paper Challenging the Abilities of Large Language Models in Italian: a Community Initiative, bringing together more than 80 contributors around a community-driven benchmark for evaluating LLMs in Italian.
Gabriele Sarti won the EAMT Best Dissertation Prize with his thesis titled From Insights to Impact: Actionable Interpretability for Neural Machine Translation. Proud supervisor once more!
Best Paper Award at TeachNLP 2026 @ EACL for Practising Responsibility: Ethics in NLP as a Hands-on Course, with Viviana Patti and Beatrice Savoldi, March 2026.
I wasn’t physically at EVALITA 2026 in Bari in February 2026, unfortunately, but I was there anyway with:
- The organisation of Cruciverb-IT. Paper: Cristiano Ciaccio, Gabriele Sarti, Alessio Miaschi, Felice Dell’Orletta, Malvina Nissim Cruciverb-IT at EVALITA 2026: Overview of the Crossword Solving in Italian Task
- TIGRO! We participated in the FadeIT shared task and our system ranked 1st in Task A! Paper: Stefano Atzeni, Gabriele Sarti, Tommaso Caselli, Malvina Nissim. TIGRO at FadeIT: E Pluribus Unum – A Multi-task Approach to Fallacy Detection and Span Identification
From January 15th until March 13th I visited ILLC - School of Informatics, the University of Edinburgh. Returning to Edinburgh, 20 years after leaving, having spent five years living here, was a true gift. Thanks to Huawei for their generous fellowship within the Informatics-Huawei Distinguished Visitor Scheme.

Older news and events

AI and freedom of speech, a short piece I wrote on writing for World Press Freedom Day, May 3rd 2025.
Gosse Minnema won the Anéla/AVT Dissertation Prize, with his thesis titled Perspective matters: event framing in language and society! It makes me a really proud supervisor.
Keynote at the Grote Taaldag 2025 (the Dutch Annual Linguistics Day) in Utrecht, 31 January 2025. Slides are available here as a pdf (please note that taken outside of my actual presentation’s context, the message they’re supposed to convey could be misunderstood.)
Keynote at the 23rd International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence AIXIA 2024 in Bolzano. Slides are available here as a pdf (please note that taken outside of my actual presentation’s context, the message they’re supposed to convey could be misunderstood.)
Thanks to a CLICK-NL 800K grant, we have started a collaboration with the Dagblad van het Noorden, 8D, and AI-Hub Noord-Nederland with the PAGINA project. More information at the project’s webpage.
“Women and Language Technology”: Keynote at Women in Data Science Belgium, Ghent, 17 May 2024. Slides are available here (please note that taken outside of my actual presentation’s context, the message they’re supposed to convey could be misunderstood.)
As a member of the UNL working group on AI I participated in a panel at the Digital Society conference in Utrecht on April 25th
Watch Your Language! Interdisciplinary workshop at the Lorentz Center in Leiden, April 8-12 2024
A year with ChatGPT: Everything you need to know! Info event organised by GroNLP and the Humane AI team, in collaboration with (hosted by) the Jantina Tammes School. (Slides available at the link.)
The HAICu project is funded! I’m involved as co-applicant, and we are about to open a PhD position on it.