Hi, I'm Vagrant!
I do research on social and technical aspects of trustworthy natural language processing. In other words, I want to get computers to do things with human language fairly and faithfully. My work is currently supported by an Independent Postdoc Fellowship at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, before which I did a PhD in computer science at Saarland University.
The technical side of my research involves proposing methods and evaluations that are inspired by linguistics (e.g., for pronominal reasoning or question answering). On the social side, I investigate gaps, opportunities, and societal implications related to how we define and operationalize abstract concepts in NLP (e.g., democratization or gender). In both types of work, I value interdisciplinarity and methodological pluralism.
You may have known me under a different name but I go by Vagrant now. Please refer to me with they/them or xe/xem pronouns, and use Dr. if you absolutely must use a title. My name is pronounced exactly like the English word, i.e., /'veɪ.gɹɘnt.'gaʊ.tʌm/, because I love birds and birding. Press the play button to hear it.
