On November 5th, Liesbeth Allein joined AIDA as an FWO Junior postdoctoral fellow. In her project “Advancing Language Models with Human Social Reasoning Skills for Socially-Aware Decision-Making”, she is eager to advance the social reasoning capabilities of large language models through three key innovations. First, she will design methods to predict social graphs from text that map real-world relationships among authors, readers, and people mentioned in a text. Second, she will devise advanced reasoning strategies inspired by human cognition that steer the social graph building process and force models to actively use social graphs for their main task predictions. Third, she will develop context-adaptive natural language processing models that adapt their predictions to subtle shifts in the social graphs, improving the fairness and accuracy of their judgments.
Previously, Liesbeth was affiliated with the Computer Science Department at KU Leuven (BE), where she worked as a postdoctoral researcher within the CHIST-ERA project iTRUST, in which she studied implicit language understanding through interpretation modeling and latent causal chain discovery (2024-2025), and the ERC-AdG project CALCULUS, focusing on commonsense and anticipation enriched learning of continuous representations supporting language understanding (2024). During her PhD in Computer Science at KU Leuven under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Marie-Francine Moens (2019-2024), she joined the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (IT) within the ML4Disinformation project on machine learning models for the verification of information and detection of disinformation (2020 – 2021) and visited the University of Copenhagen (DK) (2020).
Liesbeth further holds a M.Sc. Artificial Intelligence (2019) from KU Leuven (BE), M.A. Multilingual Communication (2017) and B.A. Applied Linguistics (2016) from Ghent University (BE).
We are very excited to have Liesbeth in our team! 🤩