I am a postdoc at Mila (Quebec AI institute) and McGill University, with Prof Siva Reddy. I obtained my PhD from the UK Research & Innovation Centre for Doctoral Training in Natural Language Processing at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Prof Dr Ivan Titov. Before that, I studied at the University of Amsterdam for my MSc and BSc in Artificial Intelligence, and I was an intern at Meta AI Research (2022) and Microsoft Research (2024).

My primary research focus currently lies on understanding the memorization vs generalization balance in LLMs, by analyzing them using data from the outside, or via interpretability techniques on the inside. Throughout my PhD, I primarily focused on this through the lens of the (non-)compositionality of language. Natural language is largely compositional, but also contains figurative and formulaic subsets, for which humans and machines both rely more heavily on memorization. Other topics I'm always happy to talk about are interpretability more generally, multilinguality, tokenization and (psycho)linguistics-inspired AI.

News

  • November 2025: find my PhD thesis here ✨
  • November 2025: I’m attending BlackboxNLP; honored to give a keynote "Memorization: myth or mystery?". You'll find my abstract on the website!
  • August 2025: Received the IJCAI 2025 JAIR award for Compositionality Decomposed! šŸ†
  • July 2025: I defended my PhD & I am joining Prof Siva Reddy as a postdoc at Mila and McGillNLP šŸ

Selected Publications

  • Memorization Inheritance in Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation for Neural Machine Translation
    Verna Dankers, Vikas Raunak
    In ACL [paper]
  • Generalisation First, Memorisation Second? Memorisation Localisation for Natural Language Classification Tasks
    Verna Dankers, Ivan Titov
    In ACL Findings [paper]
  • Memorisation cartography: mapping out the memorisation-generalisation continuum in neural machine translation
    Verna Dankers, Ivan Titov, Dieuwke Hupkes
    In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8323-8343 [paper]
  • A taxonomy and review of generalization research in NLP
    Dieuwke Hupkes, Mario Giulianelli, Verna Dankers, Mikel Artetxe, et al.
    In Nature Machine Intelligence, volume 5, pages 1161–1174 [paper]