**** We apologize for the multiple copies of this email. In case you are already registered to the next webinar, you do not need to register again. ****

Dear colleague,

We are happy to announce the next webinar in the Language Technology webinar series organized by the HiTZ research center (Basque Center for Language Technology, http://hitz.eus). We are organizing one seminar every month.

Next webinar:

Speaker: Goran Glavaš (Universität Würzburg) Title: Improving Multilingual Abilities of (Different Types of) Language Models Date: Thursday, December 4, 2025 - 15:00 CET

Summary: Language models tend to excel in languages they see the most during (pre)training—leaving low-resource languages at a stark disadvantage. But what if we could boost performance without throwing (much) more data or compute at the problem? In this talk, I’ll present a set of resource-lean (read: “cheap”) strategies that enhance multilingual language understanding and generation in low-resource settings. I’ll show how conceptually effective knowledge transfer techniques—not just bigger models—can improve multilingual capabilities across three major fronts: (1) standard text-based LLMs, (2) vision-language models, and (3) code language models. The takeaway? Scaling isn’t the only answer: for truly inclusive multilingual language technology, we need stronger inductive biases and more conceptual innovation.

Bio: Goran Glavaš is a Full Professor for Natural Language Processing at the University of Würzburg (Germany), Center for AI and Data Science (CAIDAS). His research focuses on multilingual language understanding and cross-lingual transfer, vision-and-language models, and trustworthiness of (multilingual) language models. He has (co-)authored over 120 publications in NLP and IR, regularly publishing at top-tier venues (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, EACL, TACL, SIGIR, ECIR). He received the best long paper award at EACL 2021 and outstanding paper awards at EACL 2024 and ACL 2024. He served as an Editor-in-Chief of the ACL Rolling Review (ARR) and regularly serves as (Senior) Area Chair for top-tier NLP conferences.

Registration: https://www.hitz.eus/webinar_izenematea

You can view the videos of previous webinars and the schedule for upcoming webinars here: http://www.hitz.eus/webinars

Upcoming webinars:

Thamar Solorio (January 15) Henning Wachsmuth (February 5) José Andrés González López (March 5)

Check past and upcoming webinars at the following url: http://www.hitz.eus/webinars If you are interested in participating, please complete this registration form: http://www.hitz.eus/webinar_izenematea

If you cannot attend this seminar, but you want to be informed of the following HiTZ webinars, please complete this registration form instead: http://www.hitz.eus/webinar_info

Best wishes,

HiTZ Zentroa

P.S: HiTZ will not grant any type of certificate for attendance at these webinars.