LT³ Research Group

30/03/2026

On Saturday, 21 March, LT3 Lieve Macken, Janiça Hackenbuchner, Thomas Moerman, Florian Debaene, Aaron Maladry, and Sadegh Jafari took part in the Planet Group Ekiden Gent relay race 🏃‍♂️🏃‍♀️

Together, they completed the full marathon distance of 42.195 km in a true team effort 💪

Very proud of our sportive colleagues 👏👏👏🎉

27/02/2026

🎉 Exciting news! LT3 projects have been nominated for this year’s Language Industry Awards (LIA)!

📚 Taaltechnologie Ontrafeld — nominated in the category Beste Taalpublicatie;
🚀 MATIAS — nominated in the category Beste Taalproject!

Voting is open until 22/03 (23.59 u.)

Wist je dat een op de zes volwassenen in Vlaanderen moeite heeft met lezen, schrijven, rekenen of digitale toepassingen? Belangrijke vaardigheden om alledaagse informatie te begrijpen en mee te kunnen doen in onze samenleving.

11/02/2026

Another year, another newsletter 📰

We know you've all been refreshing our page, wondering when our yearly overview would be published. Good news, the wait is over. 👏

Have a look at what we were up to in 2025 and have a go at our celebratory crossword puzzle!
➡️

LT3, Language and Translation Technology Team, is a research group at Ghent University's Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication which conducts fundamental and applied research on different aspects of Natural Language Processing (NLP) from a corpus-based inductive perspective.

31/10/2025

🎓 This month, we’ve had another impressive defense: congratulations to Dr. Sofie Labat! 👏 👏 👏

On Friday, October 24, Sofie successfully defended her thesis, "Affective Threads: Data-Driven Modeling of Emotional Processes in Social Interaction," under the supervision of Professor Veronique Hoste and Professor Thomas Demeester.

Her research delved into the intricate intersection of NLP and psychology: modeling emotions and their patterns within text threads.

The defense was preceded by two compelling invited talks: one by Professor Bennett Kleinberg (Tilburg University) on empathetic AI, and another by Professor An-Sofie Claeys (Ghent University, Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication) on humour in crisis communication.

We’re incredibly proud of Sofie’s achievement and excited to see where her research journey leads next! 🎉

06/10/2025

🎓 On Friday, 26 September, we wrapped up what has truly been a PhD marathon month at LT3 with the third and final defense in just three weeks. Wrapping up the month was Aaron Maladry, who successfully defended his thesis “When Meaning is Implicit: In Pursuit of World Knowledge in Computational Irony Modelling.”

To mark the occasion, Aaron also hosted a Meet the Expert workshop, where Roman Klinger shared insights on modelling emotion analysis and appraisals, followed by Senja Pollak’s talk on computational analysis of migration discourse. Both presentations set the tone for a stimulating afternoon of research and discussion.

Congratulations on this milestone, Dr. Maladry! 👏

24/09/2025

Last Friday, LT3 celebrated the second PhD defense of the month! 🎓 This time it was Colin Swaelens presenting his dissertation: “Verse by Verse: Modelling Semantic Similarity in Byzantine Greek Poetry.”

The defense was preceded by a meet-the-experts workshop, with interesting presentations by jury members Thea Sommerschield and Barbara McGillivray. Thea’s talk focused on answering the question “what can AI do for ancient history?”, while Barbara’s work looked at computational modelling of meaning across time in historical texts. The entire afternoon showed the possibilities of AI for humanities.

Congratulations, once again, Dr. Swaelens!

15/09/2025

Last Friday, the 35th edition of CLIN (Computation Linguistics in the Netherlands) took place in Leuven, and, as tradition goes, almost the entire LT3 team showed up!

Our team contributed 4 presentations and 7 posters, covering a wide range of topics: from language learning, resources and evaluation and language modeling to machine translation and beyond.

CLIN always offers a great opportunity to connect with colleagues from Belgium and the Netherlands and to discover the interesting research that goes on here!

Curious about the details? Check out our latest news item for an overview of all LT3 contributions: https://lt3.ugent.be/news/clin-35/

12/09/2025

This September is PhD marathon month at LT3, with 3 defenses in 3 weeks.

To kick things off, Pranay defended his thesis “Bridging the Gap: Adapting English & Multilingual Language Models for Languages Other than English” on Wednesday.

In the past 5 years, Pranay studied different approaches to improve the quality of various NLP tasks for low-resource languages. This resulted not only in interesting insights, but also in an impressive number of publications!

Once again, a big congratulations, Dr. Singh! 🎓

03/06/2025

There is a new doctor in town! 🎓

Last week, Margot Fonteyne successfully defended her dissertation in the presence of friends, family and colleagues.

In her work, titled “One Tool Fits All? The Role of Tool Type and Language Proficiency in Translation Tool-Assisted Second Language Writing Processes”, she studied how second learners of Swedish as a second language use translation tools to support their writing process.

💡One of the main contributions of her work is its focus on Swedish, moving away from the typical English-focused lens in second language acquisition and NLP research. With an excellent combination of screen recordings, eye tracking, keystroke logging — and a lot of manual annotation — she offers deep insights into L2 writing processes.

Once again, congratulations, Margot!

05/02/2025

We are excited to share the 4th edition of our yearly newsletter!

At the beginning of each year, we take some time to look back at our accomplishments of the year before. There was a lot to be proud of in 2024: from PhD defenses to the launch of our book Taaltechnologie Ontrafeld and a busy conference season.

📰 You can read all about it here:

LT3, Language and Translation Technology Team, is a research group at Ghent University's Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication which conducts fundamental and applied research on different aspects of Natural Language Processing (NLP) from a corpus-based inductive perspective.

09/12/2024

A behind the scenes look at VRT's Media Accessibility department 🎥

Students from our Audiovisual Language Techniques and Audiovisual Translation courses visited the VRT offices in Brussels. The visit allowed them to dive into the job of subtitler and audio description writer.

The VRT team gave a demo on live subtitling and our students even got a peek in the sound and editing studio for audio description 👀

One of the main goals of our CALM postgraduate programme is to give our students as much hands-on experience as possible. Company visits like these help us accomplish that goal.

A big thank you to the team at VRT for welcoming us and sharing your expertise with our students!