Invited Talk
in
Workshop: Workshop on Human-AI Co-Creativity: Advances, Opportunities, and Challenges Fri, Jul 10, 2026 • 9:30 PM – 10:00 PM PDT

Invited Talk #6 by Lonneke van der Plas: Modelling Language as a Vehicle for Creativity

Lonneke van der Plas

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Abstract

People adapt to a world that is constantly evolving. They find relationships between pairs of seemingly very distantly related conceptual systems and use these for creative problem solving or to come up with new ideas. Also, they produce an immense variety of creative output. It is an important ability that helps diversification and survival. Some forms of creativity in humans can be approximated with computational models of language, such as novel concept creation, analogical reasoning, creative story writing and creative problem solving. Still, creativity has been under-explored in NLP research which may be related to several challenges that research in creativity brings. In this talk, I will first motivate the need to investigate computational creativity and briefly discuss the challenges. After that, I will show several pieces of recent work, such as modelling analogical reasoning, assessing the creativity of LLM output and a method to improve this aspect.

Speaker

Lonneke van der Plas

Since October 2024, I am associate professor in NLP at USI in Lugano, Switzerland, leading the USI NLP research lab. Previously, I was at Idiap in Martigny (CH) and associate professor at the University of Malta from 2014-2020. Before that, I was junior professor at the Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS), University of Stuttgart, where I lead a research group in the framework of the SFB 732. I did a post-doc (maître-assistante) at the University of Geneva working in the field of cross-lingual transfer of semantic role labelling. I earned my PhD from the University of Groningen, where I worked on vector-based word representations for medical question answering. Before that, I did the M.Phil Computer Speech and Language Processing at the University of Cambridge. I have been working on the following subjects: natural language processing (nlp), computational creativity, question answering, semantic role labelling, multi-lingual NLP

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