I am a third-year Ph.D. student interested in machine translation and natural language processing, advised by Prof. Dr. Sarah Ebling and Prof. Dr. Rico Sennrich. I am currently working on automatic sign language processing and translation as part of the Flagship IICT Project. I also study computer vision and sign language linguistics to cope with the visual-gestural nature of sign language.

Since August 2021, I have also worked as a scientific programmer on the SNSF project EVOPHON with Prof. Dr. Steven Moran. There I developed experience in phonetics, phonology, and audio signal processing.

I have publications in top computational linguistics conferences (including ACL, EMNLP, EACL, LREC-COLING, and WMT). I regularly serve as a reviewer for ACL Rolling Review.

NOTICE: I am actively looking for an exchange or internship opportunity! A brief CV of mine is here.

NOTICE: for prospective collaboration and supervision on a student (master thesis) project, please only write to me with a proposed idea and motivation, ideally attached with a brief CV and transcript to show your capability. An alternative way is to attend a course I teach. I also recommend checking the CL project webpage and mailing list regularly.

Before being intrigued by languages and linguistics ...

Find me on Google Scholar.

• 2024/07: I am excited to share the preprint of our new work: SignCLIP: Connecting Text and Sign Language by Contrastive Learning, which will appear at EMNLP 2024! Thecode and a demo notebook are available.
• 2024/06: We (and deaf colleagues from HfH) were thrilled to receive the Swiss NLP Award at SwissText 2024 for our work in sign language machine translation!
• 2024/06: I talked at the Using AI to decode primate communication Symposium about Understanding Great Ape Calls and Gestures with Deep Pretrained Neural Networks , the fascinating connection between primatology and my Ph.D. work on human language. The talk was also reported in the magazine l'uniscope.
• 2024/05: I presented SwissSLi: The Multi-parallel Sign Language Corpus for Switzerland as a poster at LREC-COLING 2024 in Turin. The corpus is available on SWISSUbase.
• 2024/05: I talked at the Chinese Science Club in Zurich on Sign Language (手语) + AI = ?.
• 2024/02: I gave a colloquium talk on Recent Developments in Sign Language Processing.
• 2023/10: We published a new preprint SignBank+: Multilingual Sign Language Translation Dataset, a cleaned resource for SignWriting-based machine translation.
• 2023/10: Our paper Linguistically Motivated Sign Language Segmentation was accepted at EMNLP 2023 findings! A possible use case of the model is demonstrated in this Colab notebook.
• 2023/09: I attended the EASIER Autumn School: Sign language data meets data science – data science meets sign linguistics, a lot learned about sign language linguistics!
• 2023/09: I talked about my ongoing Ph.D. work Towards realistic sign language translation at the SLIN (Sign Language in the Netherlands) workshop in Antwerp, nice to meet you all!
• 2023/08: I presented Automatic Sound Event Detection and Classification of Great Ape Calls Using Neural Networks as a poster at ICPhS 2023 in Prague.
• 2023/07: Our paper Considerations for meaningful sign language machine translation based on glosses received an Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2023!  
• 2023/06: We released An Open-Source Gloss-Based Baseline for Spoken to Signed Language Translation and the paper appeared at the AT4SSL2023 @EAMT workshop.
• 2023/06: We released the training data for the WMT-SLT23 shared task.
• 2023/05: I presented my first research paper Machine Translation between Spoken Languages and Signed Languages Represented in SignWriting at the LoResMT @ EACL 2023 workshop in Dubrovnik, great thanks to the organizers! 
• 2022/12: The findings of the first WMT-SLT shared task (on sign language translation) (me as a co-organizer) were presented at WMT22, co-located with EMNLP 2022.
• 2022/11: I gave a talk on the preliminary work of Automatic Sound Event Detection and Classification of Great Ape Calls Using Neural Networks at the workshop Development and evolution of primate vocal communication in Neuchatel, Switzerland.
• 2022/04: I started my Ph.D. journey at the University of Zurich!
• 2022/02: I finished my master's thesis project with  Dr. Mathias Müller and Amit Moryossef on Machine Translation between Spoken Languages and Signed Languages in Written Form. Heartfelt thanks to both!