David Arps

David Arps

PhD Student in Computational Linguistics

Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf

I am a doctoral student in Computational Linguistics at HHU Düsseldorf. My advisors are Laura Kallmeyer and Hassan Sajjad. My research is funded by the project Inducing Syntactic Structure, which investigates approaches to induce syntactic structures from language models. In addition, I collaborate with the Hypermatrix Lab at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada.

I supervise BA and MA theses and student projects, with a particular interest in topics related to my research. If you are interested in pursuing a topic in this area, please get in touch. I occasionally teach in the Department of Computational Linguistics, and have taught in the Department of Computer Science.

Interests
  • Structure-inducing Language Models
  • Linguistic Evaluation of Language Models
  • Interpretability of Neural Language Models
Education
  • MA in Linguistics, with a focus on Computational Linguistics

    Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf

  • BA in Computational Linguistics

    Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf

News

  • Ongoing Serving as reviewer for ARR (since 2024), CONLL (2025, 2026), EACL Student Research Workshop (2026), BabyLM Challenge at CoNLL (2023)
  • July 2025 Attending the DeepLearn 2025 Summer School in Porto, Portugal
  • January 2025 Attending COLING in Abu Dhabi, UAE
  • October 2024 Project start for Inducing Syntactic Structure
  • June 2024 Presenting our NAACL paper that substantially extends experiments from my Master Thesis
  • February-September 2024 Funded by the Dialogue Systems and Machine Learning group, with teaching and research responsibilities
  • July 2023 Attending the ESSAI 2023 Summer School in Ljubljana, Slovenia
  • July 2023 Gave the address of the graduates at the graduation ceremony of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at HHU
  • March 2023 Presented parts of my MA thesis at the DGfS CL-Postersession in Cologne, Germany
  • December 2022: Presented our EMNLP 2022 Findings paper on Probing Neural Language Models for Constituency Structure of English nonsense sentences at the BlackboxNLP Workshp in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Contact

Institut für Linguistik
Abteilung Computerlinguistik
Gebäude 23.21. Etage 4 Raum 101
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
Universitätsstr. 1
D-40225 Duesseldorf, Germany