Keynote Talks

Advances in Multilingual Large Language Models

Abstract

Large language models have taken over the field of natural language processing. However, they are not equally accessible across all languages. Frontier models tend to focus on a couple of dozen commercially relevant languages. The talk will report on research showing how well knowledge is transferred across languages in these models, how words in different languages are represented, and how to make them more multilingual.

Short Bio

Philipp Koehn is a professor in computer science at Johns Hopkins University. He is a leading researcher in the field of machine translation, published two textbooks in the field and over 200 research papers as well as numerous datasets and open source tools. His research extends also to mulitlinguality in large language models, speech translation, and neuro-symbolic processing. Prof. Koehn received the Award of Honor from the International Association for Machine Translation in 2015 and was named ACL Fellow in 2024. He was the 2025 ACL General Chair.

Talk title and abstract to be announced.

Short Bio

Iryna Gurevych is a full professor of computer science at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, where she founded and heads the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab. She is a pioneer of computational argumentation and cross-document text modeling, with landmark applications to fact verification and misinformation detection, and her research extends to large language models and interdisciplinary NLP for the social sciences and humanities. Prof. Gurevych served as President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2023 and is an ACL Fellow, a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and Academia Europaea, and a recipient of the 2025 Royal Society Milner Award.

Talk title and abstract to be announced.

Short Bio

Haizhou Li is the Dean and X.Q. Deng Presidential Chair Professor at the School of Artificial Intelligence, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and an adjunct professor at the National University of Singapore. His research spans speech processing and natural language processing, with landmark contributions to speaker and spoken language recognition, voice conversion, and anti-spoofing. Prof. Li is an IEEE Fellow and ISCA Fellow, served as President of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) from 2015 to 2017 and Editor-in-Chief of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, and received the President's Technology Award of Singapore in 2013.

Talk title and abstract to be announced.

Short Bio

Junchi Yan is a tenured professor at the School of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where he directs the SJTU-ReThinkLab. His research centers on machine learning, in particular learning-based combinatorial optimization, graph matching, and AI for science, with applications in computer vision and autonomous driving. Prof. Yan is an IAPR Fellow, a recipient of the IEEE CIS Outstanding Early Career Award and the IEEE Computer Society AI's 10 to Watch, and in 2025 was elected the first ICML board member from mainland China. He serves on the editorial boards of IEEE TPAMI and JMLR.