Johannes Bjerva, PhD

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Associate Professor in NLP at the Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, Copenhagen, working on enabling language technology for low-resource languages, with a focus on typologically informed methods.

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Research Profile

I’m an Associate Professor affiliated with the Data, Knowledge, and Web Engineering (DKW) research group at the Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University (Campus Copenhagen). Before this, I was a tenure-track assistant professor for just under a year in the same group. I’m currently the team lead for the Copenhagen branch of the Department of Computer Science, and a member of Det Unge Akademi (the Young Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters). I spent three years as a postdoctoral researcher working with Isabelle Augenstein in CopeNLU, one of the NLP groups at the Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen. I did my PhD in Natural Language Processing at the University of Groningen working within the Parallel Meaning Bank project supervised by Johan Bos, and co-supervised by Barbara Plank. I spent most of the final year of my PhD visiting the Department of Linguistics at Stockholm University.

My research is characterised by a high focus on interdisciplinary interaction between linguistics and NLP. In 2022 I was awarded a Semper Ardens: Accelerate grant of 5 million DKK from the Carlsberg Foundation which funds three PhD students and a three-year postdoc, focussing on this interaction. Most recently I’ve been exploring the possibilities and risks in using Large Language Models (LLMs, e.g. ChatGPT and similar technologies) in the education system.

I teach on the Software BSc. education, where I focus on delivering high-quality teaching, with an approach emphasising elements of interactivity and connecting theory to practice. As a result, I was in 2020-2021 selected by our students as Teacher of the Year at the Department of Computer Science at AAU.

Academic Background

Activities

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