Jasmijn Bastings

Hi!

I am a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind in Amsterdam.

My research revolves around Natural Language Processing (NLP), frequently intersecting with other disciplines to address bias, fairness, and interpretability. I am particularly interested in the interplay between gender, language, and technology, and my work is increasingly guided by the principles of feminist AI as I study how to build systems that mitigate harm and distribute the benefits of AI more broadly across society.

I am also a firm believer in democratizing technology, which led me to co-develop two open-source projects: Joey NMT, a toolkit empowering novices around the world to build translation systems (700+ stars), and LIT, a platform for visual ML model understanding (3700+ stars).

I earned my PhD from the ILLC at the University of Amsterdam, where I was advised by Wilker Aziz, Ivan Titov, and Khalil Sima’an.

News

• I’ll speak at the workshop Measuring and mitigating bias in AI, UvA, 29 april 2026.
• I was on the PhD committee of Andrea Piergentili, who successfully defended his PhD thesis “Towards Gender-Inclusive Machine Translation” at the University of Trento and FBK.
• Our paper A decade of gender bias in machine translation is on the cover of Cell Patterns.
• I am now on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jasmijn.bastings.me
• I won an outstanding Area Chair award at ACL 2023!

Publications

Recent publications

• Amplifying Trans and Nonbinary Voices: A Community-Centred Harm Taxonomy for LLMs. Eddie L. Ungless, Sunipa Dev, Cynthia L. Bennett, Rebecca Gulotta, Jasmijn Bastings, Remi Denton. ACL 2025.
• A decade of gender bias in machine translation. Beatrice Savoldi, Jasmijn Bastings, Luisa Bentivogli, Eva Vanmassenhove. Cell Patterns, June 2025. Cover article.
• MiTTenS: A Dataset for Evaluating Gender Mistranslation. Kevin Robinson, Sneha Kudugunta, Romina Stella, Sunipa Dev, Jasmijn Bastings. EMNLP 2024.
• Low-Rank Adaptation for Multilingual Summarization: An Empirical Study. Chenxi Whitehouse, Fantine Huot, Jasmijn Bastings, Mostafa Dehghani, Chu-Cheng Lin, Mirella Lapata. Findings of NAACL, 2024.
• Diagnosing AI explanation methods with folk concepts of behavior. Alon Jacovi, Jasmijn Bastings, Sebastian Gehrmann, Yoav Goldberg, Katja Filippova. JAIR 2023.
• Dissecting Recall of Factual Associations in Auto-Regressive Language Models. Mor Geva, Jasmijn Bastings, Katja Filippova, Amir Globerson. EMNLP 2023.

See my full publication list on my Google Scholar profile.

Highlighted publications

• The elephant in the interpretability room: Why use attention as explanation when we have saliency methods?. Jasmijn Bastings, Katja Filippova. BlackboxNLP 2020.
• Interpretable neural predictions with differentiable binary variables. Jasmijn Bastings, Wilker Aziz, Ivan Titov. ACL 2019.
• Joey NMT: A Minimalist NMT Toolkit for Novices. Julia Kreutzer, Jasmijn Bastings, Stefan Riezler. EMNLP 2019. [code]
• Graph convolutional encoders for syntax-aware neural machine translation Jasmijn Bastings, Ivan Titov, Wilker Aziz, Diego Marcheggiani, Khalil Sima’an. EMNLP 2017.

You can find a full list of my publications on my Google Scholar profile.

Blog posts

• The Annotated Encoder-Decoder. Explains implementing RNN-based NMT models in PyTorch.

Code

• Interpretable Neural Predictions with Differentiable Binary Variables contains the HardKuma distribution that allows (hybrid) binary samples (with true zeros and ones) that allow gradients to pass through.
• Joey NMT is an easy-to-use, educational, and benchmarked NMT toolkit for novices that I developed with Julia Kreutzer and is currently maintained by Mayumi Ohta.
• FREVAL is an all-fragments parser evaluation metric that I developed with Khalil Sima’an.

Talks

• Workshop Measuring and mitigating bias in AI, Amsterdam, 2026. Building a Community-Centred Harm Taxonomy for LLMs.
• MilaNLP, Milan, 2024. Bits, Bats, and Bots: Deconstructing Gender in Language Technology.
• EMNLP, Blackbox NLP (Virtual), 2020. The Elephant in the Interpretability Room. (PDF)
• ACL, Florence, 2019. Interpretable Neural Predictions with Differentiable Binary Variables (Google Slides)
• EMNLP, Copenhagen, 2017. Graph Convolutional Encoders for Syntax-Aware Neural Machine Translation (Google Slides)

CV

• Senior Research Scientist, Google DeepMind. Amsterdam. Current.
• PhD in AI, ILLC, University of Amsterdam. Defended 8 October 2020.
• MSc in AI, University of Amsterdam. Cum Laude (US: with honor).
• BSc in AI, Utrecht University. Minor: Linguistics. Cum Laude (US: with honor).

Reviewing / Area Chair / Committees

I was a co-organizer of:

• Gender-Inclusive Translation Technologies 2024 (GITT 2024) (co-located with EAMT 2024).
• Blackbox NLP 2022 (co-located with EMNLP 2022)
• Blackbox NLP 2021 (co-located with EMNLP 2021)

I am currently Senior Area Chair (SAC) for:

• EMNLP (2026); track: Ethics, Bias, and Fairness.

I was Senior Area Chair (SAC) for:

• ACL (2024, 2025); track: Interpretability.

I was area chair (AC) / action editor (AE) for the following conferences:

• COLM (2024, 2025)
• ACL (2021, 2022, 2023) (Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP)
• EMNLP (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024) (Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP)
• ACL rolling review (2021-2022)
• EACL (2021) (Machine Learning for NLP)
• NAACL (2021) (Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP)

I reviewed for the following conferences and workshops:

• ACL (2019, 2020)
• EMNLP (2018, 2019, 2020)
• CoNNL (2018, 2019)
• ICLR (2020)
• MT Summit (2019)
• WMT (2018, 2019)
• Analyzing and interpreting neural networks for NLP (BlackboxNLP, 2019, 2020)
• Debugging Machine Learning Models (Debug ML, ICLR Workshop, 2019)
• Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation (WNGT, 2018, 2019, 2020)
• Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP, 2020)
• Workshop on Structured Prediction for NLP (SPNLP, 2019)

Contact

• If you’d like to contact me please find my e-mail address on my most recent publication on Google Scholar.
• Find me on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jasmijn.bastings.me
• Here is my LinkedIn profile. Feel free to connect with me if we’ve met, or follow me if we haven’t met just yet. You can always send me an e-mail.
• My code is on Github: github.com/bastings.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5445-4417