Yannick Versley

I work as a Senior Tech Lead Manager at eBay, leading a team working on LLM pretraining. Previously, I worked as a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon, first at Alexa AI and subsequently at the AGI org (Amazon Nova models). Before that, I've developed improvement processes and machine learning modeling for chatbots at OttoGroup data.works as a Senior Data Scientist, and did consulting, architecture, and implementation work around natural language processing as a Senior Cognitive Expert at IBM Services.

I have been a visiting professor (“Professurvertretung”) at
the Institute for Computational Linguistics of
the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg from Winter 2013/2014 to Winter 2015/2016 and worked as a Staff Applied Scientist for Natural Language Processing at LinkedIn in Dublin from April to May 2016, and I worked as a Senior Computational Linguist / Team Lead Natural Language Generation for LangTec, a small language technology and NLP consultancy in Hamburg.

I co-edited a new handbook on Anaphora Resolution that recently appeared with Springer.

My courses in Heidelberg ranged from an Introduction to Computational Linguistics and Mathematical Foundations which familiarizes first semesters with basic dynamic programming techniques and algorithms for syntactic and semantic processing, as well as the basics of linear algebra, to specialized Master-level courses on structured inference techniques for machine learning, an introduction to statistical parsing techniques, as well as a research module for Master-level students which resulted in two SemEval submission on semantic parsing and supersense tagging tasks.

You can reach me at my email address,
For those interested, here is my CV.

I am interested in the question how the knowledge we have of the entities we talk about influences the way we talk about them, more specifically, what part of the whole "world knowledge" does actually influence the (syntactic and discourse) structure of our language (and how?). By extension, or sometimes as an interest of its own, I'm interested in techniques that allow the efficient construction of performant, interpretable, and accurate components for computational text understanding -- preferably without the effort that precludes anyone but a few big companies from using it.

I have defended my PhD thesis (University of Tübingen, advisor: Erhard Hinrichs) on the resolution of nominal anaphora using semantic information derived from large corpora, in June 2010. The thesis is available electronically.

I have reviewed articles for (special issues or regular articles in) journals including Computational Linguistics, Dialogue and Discourse, Lingua (pre-2016) as well as Natural Language Engineering.

I co-organized the workshop on Distributional Similarity beyond Concrete Concepts at CogSci 2009, as well as several workshops of a series of workshops on Statistical Parsing of Morphologically-Rich Language (SPMRL 2013, SPMRL-SANCL 2014, SPMRL 2014). I served as an area chair for the area of "discourse semantics" at the StarSem 2014 conference.

I served as member of the program committee for SPMRL/SP-Sem-MRL (2012,2013), SemEval (2010,2013), STARSEM (2012,2013,2017,2018), Coling (2014), as well as ACL (2008,2009,2014,2015,2016,2020), EMNLP (2011,2012,2013,2014,2017,2018,2019), IJCAI (2011), and EACL (2012,2017). I have acted as an external reviewer for DFG (Germany), NWO (Netherlands), MSMT (Czech Republic), and ERC (European Research Council).

This site was made using (a modernized version of) the terrafirma layout from the Open-source Web Design page. I have changed the colors to match my graphics and changed the plant image to a view of Tübingen (near Stiftskirche) which I made in January 2006. Templating is done using jinja2 and kelvin.

For a full list, see SemanticScholar, Google Scholar or Microsoft Academic.

Journal articles.

Conference and Workshop papers.