Yana Veitsman

Hi! I’m currently a first-year PhD student at Universität Göttingen with Prof. Dr. Lisa Beinborn, working on cognitively plausible strategies for sample-efficient modeling in multilingual NLP.

I completed my Master’s degree at Saarland University, where I worked as a student research assistant under Prof. Dr. Michael Hahn and Prof. Dr. Vera Demberg.

During my Master’s, I worked on several projects covering different aspects of large language models, from the expressivity of transformer and state-space models to mechanistic interpretability in in-context learning and persistent theoretical limitations of the transformer architecture.

I also completed my Master’s thesis with Yihong Liu at the Schütze Lab at LMU Munich, investigating why better cross-lingual alignment does not necessarily lead to better cross-lingual transfer.

My research interests continue to revolve around multilingual NLP, interpretability, and efficiency. I hope to help turn the Left-Behinds and the Scraping-Bys^[1] at the very least into Hopeful and Rising Stars of the field.

Outside of work, I make other people laugh, lift heavy things, and experiment with the sourness level of my signature cocktails. I have recently held my first solo stand-up comedy show. So, either see me at the show or come by to discuss what rep range is the best for muscle hypertrophy over a Moscow Mule! Feel free to hit me up.