Jan Nieuhes

Bio

I am currently a full professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Previously, I have conducted research at the Maastricht University, Netherlands and at the LIMSI/CNRS in Orsay, France. In addition, I stayed at Carnegie Mellon University as a visiting researcher. Since March 2022, I am leading the “AI for Language Technologies” group at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. My research has covered different aspects of machine translation and spoken language translation as well as related research in natural language processing. I have been actively involved in international projects like Quaero (2008-2013), QT21 (2015-2018), Elitr (2019-2022) and Meetween (2024-2027).

In addition, I have played an active role in the organization of the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT), where I have been PC and I am currently one of the organizers. In this role, I was also involved in the creation of the ELRA, ISCA and ACL Special Interest Group on Spoken Language Translation (SIGSLT). Link: https://ai4lt.anthropomatik.kit.edu/english/index.php

Motivation

Language resources are essential to advance research and innovation in the field of language technology. With the success of machine learning approaches to language processing, their importance has only increased. I have personally observed this while developing new shared tasks for IWSLT. Over the years, ELRA has made significant contributions to the availability of language resources for human language technologies. However, ensuring access to these resources for researchers across diverse fields and diverse institutions remains a significant challenge. This issue is particularly important in the era of large language models, where resources are often concentrated within a few institutions. There is a need for available data to train and evaluate models across a variety of domains, languages, and modalities.

Future Directions

If elected, I will focus on enabling stronger connections among stakeholders in language technology—from linguistics to engineering, and from researchers to end users—across diverse fields such as written and spoken language processing. For example, at IWSLT, we have observed valuable exchange between the fields of machine translation and speech processing. ELRA is uniquely positioned to support such interdisciplinary collaboration by providing resources that raise interest and thereby drive research in new directions.

Additionally, by involving the different end users and enabling them to easily create new resources, ELRA can help to pose novel research challenges, which will help address unmet needs. I am committed to ensuring that ELRA continues to play an important role in enabling the research community to explore diverse and impactful directions in language technology.