Helen Yannakoudakis

Short Bio

I am an Assistant Professor at King's College London and Affiliated Staff at the University of Cambridge. I am accepting PhD applications in the areas of NLP/Speech/ML, so feel free to get in touch.

My research focuses on machine learning for natural language processing with emphasis on few-shot learning, meta-learning, transfer and multi-task learning; lifelong learning; multilingual NLP; and societal and health applications (e.g., automated language teaching and assessment; abusive language and hate speech detection; misinformation; emotion and mental ill-health detection).

I am also co-founder and CTO at Kinhub (formerly Kami), and a Research and Development specialist at iLexIR, working on viable commercial applications in artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Previously, I was an Affiliated Lecturer and a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Computer Science and Technology of the University of Cambridge, a Fellow and Director of Studies in Computer Science at Murray Edwards College (Cambridge), and a Newton Trust Teaching Fellow at Girton College (Cambridge). Between 2016 and 2020, I was on the executive board for the ACL Special Interest Group on Building Educational Applications (SIG-EDU), and co-organised the SIG's yearly NAACL/ACL BEA workshop.

I hold a PhD in Natural Language and Information Processing from the University of Cambridge, during which I also worked on the English Profile Programme (EPP) in collaboration with Cambridge Assessment; an MPhil in Computer Speech, Text and Internet Technology (Cambridge); and a BSc in Computer Science (Athens University of Economics & Business).

Contact: helen.yannakoudakis ät kcl.ac.uk

What's New

Honoured to have been invited to stay at Windsor Castle to talk about AI.

I am a Senior Area Chair for NAACL 2024 and an Area Chair for ICLR 2024.

I am an Area Chair for NeurIPS 2023.

I am now a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

New paper on meta-learning for cross-lingual dependency parsing accepted at ACL 2022!

Our paper on lifelong language learning got accepted at NeurIPS 2021.

My team and I are winners of Facebook's Hateful Memes Challenge, winning a prize of $8K (phase 2; team Kingsterdam). Join us at NeurIPS 2020 where we will present the details of our solution!

Invited speaker at the AAAI 2021 Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for K-12 Education.

Received a Facebook Online Safety Benchmark Research Award.

Area Chair for ACL 2020, EMNLP 2020 and NAACL 2021.

Senior Program Committee Member for AAAI 2020.

Keynote speaker at UK Speech 2019.

Try out our new browser extensions for automated abusive language detection on Twitter using deep neural networks.

We released Write&Improve, a cloud-based system that automatically assesses writing competence, predicts language proficiency and provides diagnostic feedback, targeting non-native English-language learners.

Plenary speaker at the ALTE 6th International Conference 2017.

Co-organised the first summer school in Machine Learning for Digital English Language Teaching (2017).

Selected peer-reviewed publications

  • Christopher Davis, Andrew Caines, Øistein Andersen, Shiva Taslimipoor, Helen Yannakoudakis, Zheng Yuan, Christopher Bryant, Marek Rei, and Paula Buttery. 2024. Prompting open-source and commercial language models for grammatical error correction of English learner text. arXiv:2401.07702. [arXiv] [pdf]
  • Niels van der Heijden, Ekaterina Shutova, Helen Yannakoudakis. 2023. FewShotTextGCN: K-hop neighbourhood regularization for few-shot learning on graphs. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. [arXiv] [pdf] [code]
  • Andrew Caines, Luca Benedetto, Shiva Taslimipoor, et al. 2023. On the application of Large Language Models for language teaching and assessment technology. In Proceedings of AIED2023 Empowering Education with LLMs - the Next-Gen Interface and Content Generation. [pdf]
  • Zhi Zhang, Helen Yannakoudakis, Xiantong Zhen, Ekaterina Shutova. 2023. CK-Transformer: Commonsense Knowledge Enhanced Transformers for Referring Expression Comprehension. In Findings of the 2023 Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. [arXiv] [pdf] [code]
  • Kamil Bujel, Andrew Caines, Helen Yannakoudakis and Marek Rei. 2023. Finding the Needle in a Haystack: Unsupervised Rationale Extraction from Long Text Classifiers. arXiv:2303.07991. [arXiv]
  • Avyav K. Singh, Ekaterina Shutova, Helen Yannakoudakis. 2022. Learning New Tasks from a Few Examples with Soft-Label Prototypes. arXiv 2210.17437. [arXiv]
  • Huikai Chua, Andrew Caines, Helen Yannakoudakis. 2022. A unified framework for cross-domain and cross-task learning of mental health conditions. In Proceedings of the workshop on Natural Language Processing for Positive Impact. [pdf]
  • Tamara Czinczoll, Helen Yannakoudakis, Pushkar Mishra, Ekaterina Shutova. 2022. Scientific and Creative Analogies in Pretrained Language Models. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP. [arXiv] [pdf]
  • Andrew Caines, Helen Yannakoudakis, Helen Allen, Pascual Pérez-Paredes, Bill Byrne and Paula Buttery. 2022. The Teacher-Student Chatroom Corpus version 2: more lessons, new annotation, automatic detection of sequence shifts. Proceedings of Natural Language Processing for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (NLP4CALL). [pdf]
  • Anna Langedijk, Verna Dankers, Phillip Lippe, Sander Bos, Bryan C. Guevara, Helen Yannakoudakis, Ekaterina Shutova. 2022. Meta-Learning for Fast Cross-Lingual Adaptation in Dependency Parsing. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. [pdf]
  • Aman Hussain, Nithin Holla, Pushkar Mishra, Helen Yannakoudakis, Ekaterina Shutova. 2021. Towards a Robust Experimental Framework and Benchmark for Lifelong Language Learning. In Proceedings of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Track on Datasets and Benchmarks. [pdf] [data]
  • Douwe Kiela, Hamed Firooz, Aravind Mohan, Vedanuj Goswami, Amanpreet Singh, Casey Fitzpatrick, Peter Bull, Greg Lipstein, Tony Nelli, Ron Zhu, Niklas Muennighoff, Riza Velioglu, Jewgeni Rose, Phillip Lippe, Nithin Holla, Shantanu Chandra, Santhosh Rajamanickam, Georgios Antoniou, Ekaterina Shutova, Helen Yannakoudakis, Vlad Sandulescu et al. 2021. The Hateful Memes Challenge: Competition Report. Proceedings of the NeurIPS 2020 Competition and Demonstration Track, PMLR 133:344-360, 2021. [pdf]
  • Niels van der Heijden, Helen Yannakoudakis, Pushkar Mishra and Ekaterina Shutova. 2021. Multilingual And Cross-Lingual Document Classification: A Meta-Learning Approach. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. [arXiv] [pdf] [code]
  • Kamil Bujel, Helen Yannakoudakis and Marek Rei. 2021. Zero-shot Sequence Labeling for Transformer-based Sentence Classifiers. In Proceedings of Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP). [arXiv] [pdf] [code]
  • Rishav Hada, Sohi Sudhir, Pushkar Mishra, Helen Yannakoudakis, Saif M. Mohammad, Ekaterina Shutova. 2021. Ruddit: Norms of Offensiveness for English Reddit Comments. In Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021). [arXiv] [pdf] [data]
  • Pushkar Mishra, Helen Yannakoudakis and Ekaterina Shutova. 2021. Modeling Users and Online Communities for Abuse Detection: A Position on Ethics and Explainability. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP. [pdf]
  • Phillip Lippe, Nithin Holla, Shantanu Chandra, Santhosh Rajamanickam, Georgios Antoniou, Ekaterina Shutova, Helen Yannakoudakis. 2020. A Multimodal Framework for the Detection of Hateful Memes. NeurIPS 2020 Competition Track: Hateful Memes Challenge. [arXiv] [code] (winning submission)
  • Andrew Caines, Helen Yannakoudakis, Helena Edmondson, Helen Allen, Pascual Pérez-Paredes, Bill Byrne, Paula Buttery. 2020. The Teacher--Student Chatroom Corpus. In Proceedings of the 2020 NLP4CALL, SLTC. [arXiv] [pdf] [data]
  • Simon Flachs, Ophélie Lacroix, Helen Yannakoudakis, Marek Rei and Anders Søgaard. 2020. Grammatical Error Correction in Low Error Density Domains: A New Benchmark and Analyses. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. [arXiv] [pdf] [data]
  • Nithin Holla, Pushkar Mishra, Helen Yannakoudakis, Ekaterina Shutova. 2020. Learning to Learn to Disambiguate: Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Word Sense Disambiguation. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP. [arXiv] [pdf] [code]
  • Nithin Holla, Pushkar Mishra, Helen Yannakoudakis, Ekaterina Shutova. 2020. Meta-Learning with Sparse Experience Replay for Lifelong Language Learning. arXiv:2009.04891. [arXiv] [code]
  • Shantanu Chandra, Pushkar Mishra, Helen Yannakoudakis, Madhav Nimishakavi, Marzieh Saeidi, Ekaterina Shutova. 2020. Graph-based Modeling of Online Communities for Fake News Detection. arXiv:2008.06274. [arXiv] [code]
  • Hannah Craighead, Andrew Caines, Paula Buttery and Helen Yannakoudakis. 2020. Investigating the effect of auxiliary objectives for the automated grading of learner English speech transcriptions. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. [pdf] [code]
  • Santhosh Rajamanickam, Pushkar Mishra, Helen Yannakoudakis and Ekaterina Shutova. 2020. Joint Modelling of Emotion and Abusive Language Detection. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. [arXiv] [pdf]
  • Youmna Farag, Josef Valvoda, Helen Yannakoudakis, Ted Briscoe. 2020. Analyzing Neural Discourse Coherence Models. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse. [arXiv] [pdf]
  • Pushkar Mishra, Helen Yannakoudakis and Ekaterina Shutova. 2019. Tackling Online Abuse: A Survey of Automated Abuse Detection Methods. arXiv:1908.06024. [arXiv]
  • Youmna Farag and Helen Yannakoudakis. 2019. Multi-Task Learning for Coherence Modeling. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. [arXiv] [pdf]
  • Jesse Mu, Helen Yannakoudakis and Ekaterina Shutova. 2019. Learning Outside the Box: Discourse-level Features Improve Metaphor Identification. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. [arXiv] [pdf] [code]
  • Simon Flachs, Ophélie Lacroix, Marek Rei, Helen Yannakoudakis and Anders Søgaard. 2019. A Simple and Robust Approach to Detecting Subject-Verb Agreement Errors. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. [pdf]
  • Pushkar Mishra, Marco Del Tredici, Helen Yannakoudakis and Ekaterina Shutova. 2019. Abusive Language Detection with Graph Convolutional Networks. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. [arXiv] [pdf]
  • Zheng Yuan, Felix Stahlberg, Marek Rei, Bill Byrne and Helen Yannakoudakis. 2019. Neural and FST-based approaches to grammatical error correction. In Proceedings of the 14th ACL Workshop on Innovative Use of Natural Language Processing for Building Educational Applications (GEC shared task). [pdf]
  • Samuel Bell, Helen Yannakoudakis and Marek Rei. 2019. Context is Key: Grammatical Error Detection with Contextual Word Representations. In Proceedings of the 14th ACL Workshop on Innovative Use of Natural Language Processing for Building Educational Applications. [arXiv] [pdf]
  • Guy Aglionby, Christopher Davis, Pushkar Mishra, Andrew Caines, Helen Yannakoudakis, Marek Rei, Ekaterina Shutova, and Paula Buttery. 2019. CAMsterdam at SemEval-2019 Task 6: Neural and graph-based feature extraction for the identification of offensive tweets. In Proceedings of the NAACL International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2019). [pdf]
  • Youmna Farag, Helen Yannakoudakis and Ted Briscoe. 2018. Neural Automated Essay Scoring and Coherence Modeling for Adversarially Crafted Input. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. [arXiv] [pdf]
  • Pushkar Mishra, Marco Del Tredici, Helen Yannakoudakis and Ekaterina Shutova. 2018. Author Profiling for Abuse Detection. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. [pdf] [code]
  • Helen Yannakoudakis, Øistein E. Andersen, Ardeshir Geranpayeh, Ted Briscoe and Diane Nicholls. 2018. Developing an Automated Writing Placement System for ESL Learners. Journal of Applied Measurement in Education. [pdf] (version submitted for publication)
  • Pushkar Mishra, Helen Yannakoudakis and Ekaterina Shutova. 2018. Neural Character-based Composition Models for Abuse Detection. In Proceedings of the EMNLP 2018 Workshop on Abusive Language Online. [arXiv] [pdf]
  • Helen Yannakoudakis, Marek Rei, Øistein E. Andersen and Zheng Yuan. 2017. Neural Sequence-Labelling Models for Grammatical Error Correction. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. [pdf]
  • Marek Rei and Helen Yannakoudakis. 2017. Auxiliary Objectives for Neural Error Detection Models. In Proceedings of the 12th NAACL Workshop on Innovative Use of Natural Language Processing for Building Educational Applications. [arXiv] [pdf]
  • Ekaterina Shutova, Andreas Wundsam and Helen Yannakoudakis. 2017. Semantic frames and visual scenes: Learning semantic role inventories from image and video descriptions. In Proceedings of the 6th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics: *SEM. [pdf]
  • Marek Rei and Helen Yannakoudakis. 2016. Compositional Sequence Labeling Models for Error Detection in Learner Writing. In Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. [pdf] [code]
  • Dimitrios Alikaniotis, Helen Yannakoudakis and Marek Rei. 2016. Automatic Text Scoring Using Neural Networks. In Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. [pdf]
  • Ronan Cummins, Helen Yannakoudakis and Ted Briscoe. 2016. Unsupervised Modeling of Topical Relevance in L2 Learner Text. In Proceedings of the 2016 NAACL Workshop on Innovative Use of Natural Language Processing for Building Educational Applications. [pdf]
  • Helen Yannakoudakis and Ronan Cummins. 2015. Evaluating the performance of Automated Text Scoring systems. In Proceedings of the 2015 NAACL Workshop on Innovative Use of Natural Language Processing for Building Educational Applications. [pdf]
  • Mariano Felice, Zheng Yuan, Øistein E. Andersen, Helen Yannakoudakis and Ekaterina Kochmar. 2014. Grammatical error correction using hybrid systems and type filtering. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2014): Shared Task. [pdf]
  • John Yannakoudakis, Irene Yannakoudakis, Helen Yannakoudakis, and George Papadourakis. 2014. Using an Expert System to Automatically Map the Learning Profile of Individuals. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Mobile, Hybrid, and On-line Learning, eLmL (acceptance rate: 28%).
  • Helen Yannakoudakis. 2013. Automated Assessment of English-learner Writing. University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory, TR-842.
  • Øistein E. Andersen, Helen Yannakoudakis, Fiona Barker and Tim Parish. 2013. Developing and Testing a Self-Assessment and Tutoring System. In Proceedings of the NAACL 2013 Workshop on Innovative Use of Natural Language Processing for Building Educational Applications. [pdf]
  • Helen Yannakoudakis, Gad Lim, Øistein E. Andersen, Ted Briscoe and Fiona Barker. 2013. Automatic Writing Assessment and Feedback: An Approach to Improve Construct and Consequential Validity. In Proceedings of the Language Testing Research Colloquium.
  • Theodora Alexopoulou, Helen Yannakoudakis and Angeliki Salamoura. 2013. Classifying Intermediate Learner English: A Data-driven Approach to Learner Corpora. In S. Granger, G. Gilquin & F. Meunier (eds) Twenty Years of Learner Corpus Research: Looking back, Moving ahead. Corpora and Language in Use – Proceedings 1, Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain.
  • Helen Yannakoudakis, Ted Briscoe and Theodora Alexopoulou. 2013. Automated Assessment models, Visual User Interfaces, and Second Language Acquisition research: an interdisciplinary perspective. In Language Sciences in the 21st Century: The interdisciplinary challenge.
  • Helen Yannakoudakis, Ted Briscoe and Theodora Alexopoulou. 2012. Automating Second Language Acquisition Research: Integrating Information Visualisation and Machine Learning. In Proceedings of the EACL 2012 joint Workshop of LINGVIS & UNCLH. [pdf]
  • Helen Yannakoudakis and Ted Briscoe. 2012. Modeling Coherence in ESOL Learner Texts. In Proceedings of the NAACL 2012 Workshop on Innovative Use of Natural Language Processing for Building Educational Applications. [pdf]
  • Helen Yannakoudakis, Ted Briscoe and Ben Medlock. 2011. A New Dataset and Method for Automatically Grading ESOL Texts. In Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (acceptance rate: 26%). [pdf]
  • Theodora Alexopoulou, Helen Yannakoudakis and Ted Briscoe. 2010. From Discriminative Features to Learner Grammars: A Data-driven Approach to Learner Corpora. In Proceedings of the Second Language Research Forum.
  • Theodora Alexopoulou, Helen Yannakoudakis and Ted Briscoe. 2010. L1 Effects and Personalised Learning in Globalised Learning Settings. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Applied Generative Second Language Acquisition.