Verna Dankers
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vernadankers.bsky.social
Verna Dankers
@vernadankers.bsky.social
Postdoc at ‪Mila & McGill University 🇨🇦 with a PhD in NLP from the University of Edinburgh 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 memorization vs generalization x (non-)compositionality. she/her 👩‍💻 🇳🇱
Full house at BlackboxNLP at #EMNLP2025!! Getting ready for my 1.45PM keynote 😎 Join us in A102 to learn about "Memorization: myth or mystery?"
November 9, 2025 at 3:05 AM
Reposted by Verna Dankers
🏆 full house at the IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Award #talk delivered by Verna Dankers on Compositionality Decomposed: How do Neural Networks Generalise?! #IJCAI2025
August 20, 2025 at 3:43 PM
Reposted by Verna Dankers
Congratulations to the winners of the 2025 IJCAI–JAIR Prize for their paper “Compositionality Decomposed: How Do Neural Networks Generalise?” — Dieuwke Hupkes, Verna Dankers, Mathijs Mul, and Elia Bruni! Presented by Edith Elkind, Northwestern University arxiv.org/abs/1908.08351
#IJCAI2025
August 19, 2025 at 7:12 PM
Proud to accept a 5y outstanding paper award
@ijcai.org 🏆 from the Journal of AI Research for the impact Compositionality Decomposed has had, on behalf of the team (Dieuwke Hupkes, Elia Bruni & Mathijs Mul)!🧡 Come to room 513 on Wed@11.30 to learn about rethinking compgen evaluation in the LLM era🤖
August 19, 2025 at 6:28 PM
Had a blast at #ACL2025 connecting with new/familiar faces, explaining the many affiliations on my badge, chatting about memorisation--generalisation, and visiting stunning Schönbrunn. A shoutout to the co-organisers & speakers of the successful @l2m2workshop.bsky.social 🧡 I learnt a lot from you!
August 4, 2025 at 2:36 AM
Thrilled to be in Vienna to learn about all the papers & catch up with NLP friends 🇦🇹 You'll find me at the ACL mentorship session (Mon 2PM), at our @l2m2workshop.bsky.social (Fri) and at my poster (Wed 11AM)! I'll present work w/ @vyraun.bsky.social on memorization in NMT under SeqKD #ACL2025 (1/5)
July 27, 2025 at 3:37 PM
I miss Edinburgh and its wonderful people already!! Thanks to @tallinzen.bsky.social and @edoardo-ponti.bsky.social for inspiring discussions during the viva! I'm now exchanging Arthur's Seat for Mont Royal to join @sivareddyg.bsky.social's wonderful lab @mila-quebec.bsky.social 🤩
Huge congratulations to Dr. @vernadankers.bsky.social for passing her viva today! 🥳🎓

It's truly been an honour sharing the PhD journey with you. I wasn’t ready for the void your sudden departure left (in the office and in my life!).
Your new colleagues are lucky to have you! 🥺🥰
July 1, 2025 at 9:33 PM
Reposted by Verna Dankers
Models like DeepSeek-R1 🐋 mark a fundamental shift in how LLMs approach complex problems. In our preprint on R1 Thoughtology, we study R1’s reasoning chains across a variety of tasks; investigating its capabilities, limitations, and behaviour.
🔗: mcgill-nlp.github.io/thoughtology/
April 1, 2025 at 8:07 PM
Super excited about the First L2M2 (Large Language Model Memorization) workshop at #ACL2025 in Vienna @l2m2workshop.bsky.social! 🥳 Submit via ARR in February, or directly to the workshop in March! Archival and non-archival contributions are welcome. 🗒️ sites.google.com/view/memoriz...
January 27, 2025 at 10:03 PM
Reposted by Verna Dankers
thinking of calling this "The Illusion Illusion"

(more examples below)
December 1, 2024 at 2:33 PM