Wilker Aziz

I am an assistant professor at the ILLC, University of Amsterdam. My main interests revolve around machine learning and natural language processing.

I am an assistant professor (UD) in natural language processing at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation where I lead the Probabilistic Language Learning group.

My work concerns the design of models and algorithms that learn to represent, understand, and generate language data. Examples of specific problems I am interested in include language modelling, machine translation, syntactic parsing, textual entailment, text classification, and question answering.

I also develop techniques to approach general machine learning problems such as probabilistic inference, gradient and density estimation.

My interests sit at the intersection of disciplines such as statistis, machine learning, approximate inference, global optimisation, formal languages, and computational linguistics.

Service

I often serve on the program committee of ML/CL/NLP/MT conferences

  • ML conferences: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR
  • CL/NLP conferences: ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, Coling, IJCNLP, CoNLL
  • MT conferences: WMT, EAMT, AMTA, MT Summit

including as area chair

  • *SEM2019 (machine learning for NLP)
  • ACL2020 (machine learning for NLP), ACL2021 (machine translation and multilinguality)
  • ICRL2021 (outstanding area chair)
  • ICLR2022

and I also review for CL/NLP/MT journals

  • TACL
  • Natural Language Engineering
  • Machine Translation

I am a standing reviewer and action editor for ARR.

Background

In January 2019 I joined the faculty of science (FNWI at UvA) as assistant professor, before that I was a research associate at the ILLC working with Prof Khalil Sima’an at the Statistical Language Processing and Learning Lab from January 2014 to December 2018.

From November 2013 to December 2014, I worked at the University of Sheffield with Dr Lucia Specia.

I obtained my PhD from the University of Wolverhampton (UK) in February 2014.

In two occasions, I interned at XRCE (France), first as an undergraduate and then as a PhD candidate, where I had the great pleasure to work with Marc Dymetman.

In 2010, I obtained my BSc degree in Computer Engineering from the Engineering School of the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil).