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Photo of Jenny Kunz

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

Cover of publication 'Understanding Large Language Models: Towards Rigorous and Targeted Interpretability Using Probing Classifiers and Self-Rationalisation'
Jenny Kunz (2024)

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 Âé¶¹Éç (2019-2024)
    Postdoc at Âé¶¹Éç (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.

  • Chair of the IDA PhD Council, 2022-2024.
  • IDA Board PhD student co-representative, 2022-2024.

Publications

2026

Jenny Kunz (2026) Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Vol. 14, p. 1266-1285 (Article in journal)
Jenny Kunz (2026) Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026) (Conference paper)
Jenny Kunz, Anja Jarochenko, Marcel Bollmann (2026) Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026) (Conference paper)

2025

Jenny Kunz (2025) 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) Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), p. 849-871 (Conference paper)

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