Vagrant Gautam
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dippedrusk.com
Vagrant Gautam
@dippedrusk.com
2.4K followers 470 following 280 posts
I do research on trustworthy NLP, i.e., social + technical aspects of fairness, reasoning, etc.

pronouns: xe/they (Deutsch: keine)
nouns: computer scientist, linguist, birder
adjectives: trans, queer, autistic

https://dippedrusk.com
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dippedrusk.com
@pranav-nlp.bsky.social and I are surveying researchers about naming and name changes in academia (especially computer science).

If your academic name is / has been / might someday be different from other names you've used, please tell us about it here: forms.cloud.microsoft/e/E0XXBmZdEP
Naming in academia: Fill out our survey! We're surveying scholars about naming and name change experiences in academia. This includes spelling variations, reordering, changing any part of your name, for any reason: gender transition, marriage, divorce, immigration, cultural reasons, or recognition. This surveys takes around 5-10 minutes!
November 7, 2025 at 2:57 PM
dippedrusk.com
I was Delores from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice for Halloween!
Vagrant (me) staring into the distance wearing smokey makeup, a long-haired black wig, and a black scar on xyr face that is fake-stapled together with shiny silvery stickers. I'm also wearing a black dress that looks very goth. Monica Bellucci is a divine vision for goths everywhere with her stapled face, tear-stained smokey makeup, dark flowing hair and black dress from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. She looks unhappy, betrayed, and stunning.
November 1, 2025 at 8:51 PM
Reposted by Vagrant Gautam
queerinai.com
Attending COLM next week in Montreal? 🇨🇦 Join us on Thursday for a 2-part social! ✨ 5:30-6:30 at the conference venue and 7:00-10:00 offsite! 🌈 Sign up here: forms.gle/oiMK3TLP8ZZc...
Queer in AI @ COLM 2025. Thursday, October 9 5:30 to 10 pm Eastern Time. There is a QR code to sign up which is linked in the post.
October 1, 2025 at 2:40 PM
dippedrusk.com
I will be
- at the Aarhus conference 🇩🇰 on Monday for our workshop on representation + representativeness with synthetic data
- living in Heidelberg 🇩🇪 in 2 weeks
- in Edinburgh 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 in late September giving a talk at the ILCC (on reasoning about reference, probably)
- in Montreal 🇨🇦 in October for COLM
August 14, 2025 at 7:11 PM
dippedrusk.com
I'm not at #ACL2025, but my student Elisa will be there presenting our work on LLMs' gender and country stereotypes in English, Spanish, and German, at the @genderbiasnlp.bsky.social workshop.
aclanthology.org/2025.gebnlp-...
Colombian Waitresses y Jueces canadienses: Gender and Country Biases in Occupation Recommendations from LLMs
Elisa Forcada Rodríguez, Olatz Perez-de-Vinaspre, Jon Ander Campos, Dietrich Klakow, Vagrant Gautam. Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP). 2025.
aclanthology.org
July 26, 2025 at 10:45 AM
dippedrusk.com
Have you or a loved one been misgendered by an LLM? How can we evaluate LLMs for misgendering? Do different evaluation methods give consistent results?
Check out our preprint led by the newly minted Dr. @arjunsubgraph.bsky.social, and with Preethi Seshadri, Dietrich Klakow, Kai-Wei Chang, Yizhou Sun
Agree to Disagree? A Meta-Evaluation of LLM Misgendering
Numerous methods have been proposed to measure LLM misgendering, including probability-based evaluations (e.g., automatically with templatic sentences) and generation-based evaluations (e.g., with aut...
arxiv.org
June 11, 2025 at 1:28 PM
dippedrusk.com
Submitted! 🥳 Stay tuned for a defense date in 3-ish months
Three bright pink softbound review copies of my PhD dissertation: Fair and Faithful Processing of Referring Expressions in English, submitted towards a Doctor of Engineering degree at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at Saarland University. The thesis is surrounded by a small zoo of crocheted birds, my bird water bottle, and other knickknacks at my work desk.
June 4, 2025 at 11:00 AM
Reposted by Vagrant Gautam
interplay-workshop.bsky.social
🚨🚨 Studying the INTERPLAY of LMs' internals and behavior?

Join our
@colmweb.org
workshop on comprehensivly evaluating LMs.

Deadline: June 23rd
CfP: shorturl.at/sBomu
Page: shorturl.at/FT3fX

We're excited to see your insights and methods!!

See you in Montréal 🇨🇦 #nlproc #interpretability
Call for Papers, Interplay Workshop at COLM: June 23rd - submissions due. July 24th - acceptance notification. October 10th - workshop day.
May 16, 2025 at 9:27 AM
Reposted by Vagrant Gautam
dippedrusk.com
Do you have Opinions™ on what it means to "represent" things and people with data? Then submit 1-2 pages by May 28th and join us in Århus 🇩🇰 this summer to discuss representation and representativeness with synthetic data!
Call for Participation | Synthetic Data
Workshop on synthetic data at the Aarhus Conference 2025
synthetic-data-workshop.github.io
May 14, 2025 at 9:53 PM
dippedrusk.com
Do you have Opinions™ on what it means to "represent" things and people with data? Then submit 1-2 pages by May 28th and join us in Århus 🇩🇰 this summer to discuss representation and representativeness with synthetic data!
Call for Participation | Synthetic Data
Workshop on synthetic data at the Aarhus Conference 2025
synthetic-data-workshop.github.io
May 14, 2025 at 9:53 PM
dippedrusk.com
I'm teaching for the first time this semester and I am thrilled with how my concepts class is going! We discussed interpretability today after reading 2 critique papers (Lipton's Mythos of Model Interpretability and Krishnan's Against Interpretability) and 2 content papers: Patchscopes and RAVEL. 🧵
Title slide: Defining and Measuring Abstract Concepts in NLP, Vagrant Gautam (they/them). The slide features a meme of a felt mouse in a hat carrying berries and some sort of sceptre is on the right, with the text "I am plagued by concepts."
May 8, 2025 at 9:34 PM
dippedrusk.com
Come to my keynote tomorrow at the first official @queerinai.com workshop at #NAACL2025 to hear about how trans languaging is complex and cool, and how this makes it extra difficult to process computationally. I will have SO many juicy examples!
Title slide: Processing Trans Languaging - Vagrant Gautam (they/xe), Saarland University, with a very brightly patterned background featuring colourful people and math symbols.
May 3, 2025 at 8:52 PM
dippedrusk.com
Best part of dissertation-writing is reading all sorts of things, including Ellen F. Prince making fun of sociolinguists in 1981.
An interaction: [A and B are passing each other on the street] A: Hi. B: Hi. Ellen F. Prince's interpretation of this interaction as the communication of "ritual finformation." [A and B are passing each other on the street] A: I am aware of your presence, I am not hostile, and I shall part ready to come into friendly contact again at some future time. B: Damn sociolinguists...
April 27, 2025 at 9:05 AM
Reposted by Vagrant Gautam
queerinai.com
Announcing our first workshop keynote!

"Processing Trans Languaging" by Vagrant Gautam @dippedrusk.com at 13:30 - 14:30 MDT on May 4, 2025

Read on for a description of the talk! 🧵
A headshot of Vagrant. Vagrant is outdoors, wearing a black jacket and spiked choker, and smiling.
April 25, 2025 at 3:32 AM
dippedrusk.com
If you were ever curious about the timeline of name changes as a Canadian immigrant in Germany, here's my data spanning 2 years for just the most important stuff. This does not include everywhere else I had to change my name, i.e., phone companies in Germany and Canada, public transit apps,
Gantt chart of Vagrant's name change schedule spanning over 2 years, from April 2022 to June 2024. The legal name change, passport and visa are all plotted, along with the timeline for banks and universities in Canada and Germany, and 2 papers in PLOS One (which took almost 2 full years) and the ACL Anthology, which was done in less than a month with a pull request I made myself. In general, the German things took much longer than the Canadian things. The legal name change itself took nearly a year, a saga that I've chronicled in an old blog post, as did changing my name with my German bank, because they wouldn't accept just a legal name change - they also wanted my passport and visa to be updated (which are linear dependencies). Similarly, Saarland University would not just allow me to have Vagrant Gautam as my display name on Teams for other students and my instructors to see, and instead they waited for my entire legal name change process to be complete before I could have the dignity of being recognized by my own name.
April 17, 2025 at 9:44 PM
Reposted by Vagrant Gautam
elbrodie.bsky.social
US students. Looking to apply to graduate school? Had an offer rescinded recently? The University of British Columbia in Canada will re-open the application portal in some departments for US students from April 14-18.
Details: www.grad.ubc.ca/us-applicant...
#ubc #AcademicSky #PhDSky #ScienceSky
US Applicant Week
www.grad.ubc.ca
April 11, 2025 at 7:03 PM
dippedrusk.com
@pranav-nlp.bsky.social is speaking at the @i2sc.net about how seemingly neutral policies can cause harm when developed without input from marginalized communities, with examples from the AI Act and name change policies in academia
Pranav A in a colourful jacket in front of an I2SC banner and a monitor displaying his first slide: Policy Impact: From AI Regulation to Academic Inclusion.
April 11, 2025 at 10:51 AM
dippedrusk.com
Just found a 2010 paper about automatically translating poetry, and one of the reviewers apparently wrote their entire review in verse! The authors link to the full review in a footnote - here's a snippet.
From an anonymous reviewer: This paper has an admirable objective; one that would have most of us spewing invective. Can current SMT systems be hacked to translate verse with its form intact? It sounds difficult but don't be alarmed; simply cast each form of verse you wish unharmed into a feature that maintains state of the relevant kind. Do the voodoo they do and you can use both Moses and Hiero, you'll find. Ahh, you say, what if I am not as picky, and want my decoder to produce any kind of poetry? Fear not, the authors thought of that too- a min-combination of these verse features is in the cards for you.
April 4, 2025 at 8:54 AM
dippedrusk.com
life update: i have discovered Gaming™
Screenshot from the game Unpacked, where I have fully unpacked the contents of a cute, animated study which is in a brick building with lots of natural light coming in through the windows. There is a work desk and chair with computer stuff, lots of art on the wall, and some shelving for books and such. The desk looks a bit crowded, but that's how I like my desks. Screenshot from the game Undertale, a retro-style video game. My character stands before a sign behind which there are two spider webs of different sizes. The sign reads: Spider Bake Sale. All proceeds go to real spiders. Animated Luxembourg from the game Euro Truck Simulator 2, showing a road leading up to the Fortress of Luxembourg. A text box says: At last you have the chance to experience your dream job - driving a truck! This has unironically been one of my dream jobs for years, so I'm really enjoying this game. View from the inside of my truck in Euro Truck Simulator 2, as I make a lane change on a highway in Germany to do my pea delivery in Nuremberg. My side mirror shows that there is nothing around me, because it's quite early: 5:37 am. The dashboard shows that my high beams are on even though it's daylight and I clearly don't need them anymore, so I guess I forgot to turn them off.
March 22, 2025 at 11:24 PM
Reposted by Vagrant Gautam
angelinawang.bsky.social
I've recently put together a "Fairness FAQ": tinyurl.com/fairness-faq. If you work in non-fairness ML and you've heard about fairness, perhaps you've wondered things like what the best definitions of fairness are, and whether we can train algorithms that optimize for it.
March 17, 2025 at 2:39 PM
Reposted by Vagrant Gautam
v3333333333.bsky.social
Max and Owen are here

Two 4x4 dog pet portraits
Max, a fluffy small dog, looks towards the right. They are green, purple, black, and white with blue linework. The background is light blue with green, purple, blue, white, and black dots. This is an example of a 4x4 pet portrait. You can get one of your pets for 30 or 25 if you get 2 or more. Offer good until the end of February. Next month they will be 35. Owen, a fluffy small dog, looks towards the left. They are green, purple, black, and white with blue linework. The background is light blue with green, purple, blue, white, and black dots. This is an example of a 4x4 pet portrait. You can get one of your pets for 30 or 25 if you get 2 or more. Offer good until the end of February. Next month they will be 35.
February 25, 2025 at 6:46 PM
dippedrusk.com
I have a gift for the language enjoyers:
> It's making me never want to have stilettos even more than I already never want to have stilettos
🐦🐦
February 15, 2025 at 11:10 AM
Reposted by Vagrant Gautam
hypercubexl.bsky.social
saying "go birds" but just rooting for birds in general, hope they're having fun and not catching that flu
February 9, 2025 at 7:42 PM
Reposted by Vagrant Gautam
skyladawn.ca
I had this weird feeling of...patriotism? I think?...stir in me, I've not felt this since a beer commercial in the mid-90s.
February 2, 2025 at 2:53 AM
Reposted by Vagrant Gautam
lukelukeluke.bsky.social
Women love me. Fish love me. I do my best to care for all creatures and even when I fail they see my efforts
January 30, 2025 at 1:30 PM