We are excited to share the following speakers have kindly accepted to give invited talks at INLG2025.

Keynote 1: Verena Rieser (Google DeepMind)

Short Bio: Verena Rieser is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, where she founded the VOICES team (Voices-of-all in alignment). Her team’s mission is to enhance Gemini’s safety and usability for diverse communities. Verena has pioneered work in data-driven multimodal Dialogue Systems and Natural Language Generation, encompassing conversational RL agents, faithful data-to-text generation, spoken language understanding, evaluation methodologies, and applications of AI for societal good. Verena previously directed the NLP lab as a full professor at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, and held a Royal Society Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship. She earned her PhD from Saarland University.

Keynote 2: Hadas Kotek (Apple)

Short Bio: Dr. Hadas Kotek is a Sr. Engineering Manager at Apple and a Research Affiliate at the MIT Department of Linguistics. She currently leads the data and evaluation efforts for the Apple Intelligence Responsible AI team. In this role, she focuses on identifying, evaluating, and developing mitigation strategies for harms and biases in customer-facing products that use Apple’s Large Language Models and Diffusion Models. Dr. Kotek has published on diverse topics in the domains of Responsible AI and NLP, including gender bias, hallucinations, evaluating model handling of controversial topics, improving human annotation quality, and human-in-the-loop strategies for annotation; and topics in Linguistics, including the structure and meaning of questions and experimental approaches to the study of quantification and numerosity. Prior to joining Apple, Dr. Kotek held visiting teaching and research positions in Linguistics at Yale, New York University, and McGill University.

Keynote 3: Minlie Huang (黄民烈; Tsinghua University)

Short Bio: His general interests include artificial intelligence, deep learning, and natural language processing. He is particularly interested in the following fields:

• Natural language generation theories, models & evaluation
• Fundamental problems in large language models and multi-modal foundation models
• AI alignment, safety and ethics
• Social intelligence with large language models (emotion, theory-of-mind, mental health applications)

He is leading a research group named Conversational AI (CoAI, GitHub link). This group published more than 100 papers on ACL, ICLR, ICML, Neurips conferences, and has won many paper awards including COLING 2010 best paper, ACL 2012 best student paper, IJCAI 2018 distinguished paper, SIGDIAL 2020 best paper, NLPCC 2015/2020 best paper, ACL 2023/2024 area chair award, etc. They have also highly cited works including emotional chatting machine (AAAI 2018), ESC (ACL 2021), PPT (ACL 2022), MiniLLM (ICLR 2024), ChatGLM (2024, with Prof. Jie Tang), etc.

Keynote 4: Michael White (Ohio State University)

Short Bio: Dr. Michael White is Professor and Vice Chair in the Department of Linguistics at The Ohio State University. Prior to joining OSU, Dr. White was a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and before that he was a partner in the pioneering NLG company CoGenTex. His research has focused on NLG in dialogue with an emphasis on surface realization, extending also to paraphrasing for ambiguity avoidance and data augmentation in the context of OSU’s virtual patient dialogue system. His current research is centered on bootstrapping techniques for training reliable dialogue systems with synthetic conversations and automatic evaluation. He co-organized the NSF Workshop on Shared Tasks in NLG which provided a crucial impetus for the initial shared tasks in NLG, and he was a co-organizer of the first surface realization shared task. From 2018 to 2021, Dr. White collaborated with conversational AI researchers at the company formerly known as Facebook, where he was twice a Visiting Research Scientist. At present, he is just managing to keep his head above water as one of the ACL Rolling Review Editors in Chief.

Keynote 5: Iryna Gurevych (TU Darmstadt)

Short Bio: Iryna Gurevych is Professor of Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing in the Department of Computer Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany. She also is an adjunct professor at MBZUAI in Abu-Dhabi, UAE, and an affiliated professor at INSAIT in Sofia, Bulgaria. She is widely known for fundamental contributions to natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. Professor Gurevych is a past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the leading professional society in NLP. Her many accolades include being a Fellow of the ACL, an ELLIS Fellow, and the recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant. Most recently, she has received the 2025 Milner award of the British Royal Society for her major contributions to NLP and artificial intelligence that combine deep understanding of human language and cognitive faculty with the latest paradigms in machine learning.