about

I'm Seth Aycock, a PhD candidate in multilingual NLP at the University of Amsterdam. I work with Christof Monz and Khalil Sima'an. I work with many other collaborators too. My research interests can be summarised by these keywords:
machine translation, multilinguality, low-resource, linguistics, typology, reasoning, data.

I studied Linguistics (BA, Cambridge), and Speech & Language Processing (MSc, Edinburgh). I've worked in multilingual NLP research at Booking.com, Inria Paris, City University London, and the UK Government, with research visits to the University of Helsinki in Finland, and NII in Japan.

news

  • ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง 09/26 Upcoming research internship at Cohere, London, working with Kris Cao on pre-training data
  • ๐Ÿ‡ฏ๐Ÿ‡ต 07/26 Gave an invited talk at LLMC's technical seminar
  • ๐Ÿ‡ฏ๐Ÿ‡ต 07/26 Research visit at LLMC, NII in Tokyo with Michal ล tefanik, working on linguistic reasoning
  • ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ 07/26 Oral presentation of Multilingual Merging paper at MeLLM @ ACL
  • ๐Ÿ‡ณ๐Ÿ‡ฑ 06/26 Attended EAMT 2026 in Tilburg
  • ๐ŸŒ 06/26 Please Translate Again paper discussed in a podcast with ex-Google Translate lead
  • ๐Ÿ‡ญ๐Ÿ‡บ 04/26 Co-organising WMT26 multilingual instruction shared task
  • ๐Ÿ‡ฒ๐Ÿ‡ฆ 03/26 Perfect English paper accepted at EACL Findings
  • ๐Ÿ‡ฒ๐Ÿ‡ฆ 03/26 LLM-as-a-qualitative-judge paper accepted at MME @ EACL
  • ๐Ÿ‡ซ๐Ÿ‡ฎ 02/26 Gave an invited talk at University of Helsinki research seminar
  • ๐Ÿ‡ซ๐Ÿ‡ฎ 01/26 Research visit at University of Helsinki with Jรถrg Tiedemann, working on linguistic reasoning
  • ๐Ÿ’ฐ 01/26 Received individual EAMT grant for linguistic reasoning research
  • ๐Ÿ’ฐ 12/25 Received UniDive COST Action STSM grant for visit in Helsinki
  • ๐Ÿ‡จ๐Ÿ‡ณ 11/25 Presented at EMNLP & WMT25 in Suzhou, China: Please Translate Again paper and WMT25 Shared Task paper
  • ๐Ÿ‡ซ๐Ÿ‡ฎ 08/25 Attended MT Marathon in Helsinki, Grammar Book paper mentioned in 2 keynotes!
  • ๐Ÿ‡ณ๐Ÿ‡ฑ 06/25 Internship at Booking.com in Amsterdam, working on multilingual model merging
  • ๐Ÿ‡ธ๐Ÿ‡ฌ 04/25 Attended ICLR in Singapore, presenting Can LLMs Really Translate...? paper
  • ๐Ÿ‡ซ๐Ÿ‡ท 03/25 Attended ALPS winter school in Aussois, started LLM-as-a-qualitative-judge project
  • ๐Ÿ‡จ๐Ÿ‡ฟ 02/25 Gave an invited talk at รšFAL, Charles University
  • ๐Ÿ’ฐ 01/25 Received EAMT grant for LLM prompt brittleness project
  • ๐Ÿ‡จ๐Ÿ‡ฟ 08/24 Attended MT Marathon in Prague, started LLM prompt brittleness project
  • ๐Ÿ‡ฒ๐Ÿ‡น 03/24 Attended EACL in Malta, presenting Topic-guided examples paper
  • ๐Ÿ‡ณ๐Ÿ‡ฑ 11/23 Started PhD at University of Amsterdam with Christof Monz and Khalil Sima'an
  • ๐Ÿ‡ซ๐Ÿ‡ท 08/23 Research engineer at Almanach, Inria Paris with Rachel Bawden
  • ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง 03/23 Research assistant at City, University of London with Pranava Madhyastha