Aarne Talman
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Aarne Talman

I’m a computational linguist and language technology researcher. My research focuses on natural language understanding, reasoning and natural language inference using machine learning. I’m interested in what understanding language consists of, how it can be modelled in AI and how these models can be evaluated.

Portrait of Aarne Talman

About

I’m a Visiting Scholar in language technology at the University of Helsinki, where I also teach the course Large Language Models and Generative AI for NLP. Alongside research, I work as Senior Manager, Software Development at AMD Silo AI.

My path has combined research and industry. After studying philosophy and logic at the London School of Economics and computational linguistics and formal grammar at King’s College London, I spent over a decade in software engineering, R&D management and technology consulting, at Nokia, Gartner and Accenture among others. I then returned to research for my PhD in language technology at the University of Helsinki, completed in 2024 alongside industry roles leading AI and language model work. More under Industry experience.

Research

Natural language inference and reasoning
Whether models can draw the inferences that understanding a language requires, and how such reasoning can be modelled with machine learning. My work here includes sentence encoder architectures for natural language inference and inference models that can express their own uncertainty.
Evaluating language understanding
Whether models that score well on language understanding benchmarks capture meaning, or exploit shortcuts in the data. My doctoral work showed that models can keep much of their performance even when benchmark data is deliberately corrupted, and that results often fail to carry over from one benchmark to another. I also organise shared tasks in ELOQUENT, a lab at CLEF for evaluating generative language models.
Meaning and understanding
What understanding language consists of, and what formal semantics and logic can tell us about the abilities and limits of neural language models.

Publications

Also on Google Scholar.

Journal and conference papers

Doctoral dissertation

Shared task overviews

Technical writing

Talks and media

Selected talks

I have given numerous talks at academic and industry events. A selection:

  • 2022
    How does data corruption affect natural language understanding models? *SEM 2022, Seattle
  • 2022
    Multimodal and multilingual vector search with hardware acceleration Berlin Buzzwords 2022, Berlin, with Dmitry Kan
  • 2022
    Demo: multilingual and multimodal vector search ValleyML AI Expo 2022
  • 2021
    NLI data sanity check: assessing the effect of data corruption on model performance NoDaLiDa 2021, Reykjavik
  • 2019
    Neural network models of NLI fail to capture the general notion of inference Invited talk, CLASP, University of Gothenburg
  • 2019
    Predicting prosodic prominence from text with pre-trained contextualized word representations NoDaLiDa 2019, Turku
  • 2018
    Unlock the value of your data assets Gartner Symposium, Barcelona
  • 2018
    Business value of AI AI Monday, Helsinki

In the media

Teaching

  • Large Language Models and Generative AI for NLP, Master’s course, University of Helsinki, every autumn since 2024, with Jussi Karlgren and Dmitry Kan.
  • Natural Language Understanding and Representation Learning, Master’s course, University of Helsinki, 2020, with Alessandro Raganato.
  • Supervision of Master’s theses in language technology.

Industry experience

I have worked in industry for about twenty years, from software engineering to leading AI teams. At Silo AI I was responsible for a 6 million euro Business Finland programme on trustworthy large language models, and co-led a 12 million GPU-hour allocation on the LUMI supercomputer for language model pre-training.

  • 2025–
    Senior Manager, Software Development AMD Silo AI, Helsinki AI software development, focusing on large-model inference and performance on AMD GPUs.
  • 2024–2025
    Senior Manager & EMEA ML Lead Accenture, Helsinki Led the Machine Learning and Computational Science practice and the Model Customization capability at the EMEA Centre for Advanced AI.
  • 2023–2024
    Head of R&D SiloGen (Silo AI), Helsinki Led research and development of open large language models, including Poro.
  • 2021–2023
    Senior AI Engineer, Lead AI Engineer and Lead AI Scientist Silo AI, London and Helsinki Natural language processing, search, speech recognition and natural language understanding.
  • 2020–2021
    UK CTO and Global ML Practice Lead Nordcloud, United Kingdom
  • 2019–2020
    Founder and CEO Basement AI, Finland and United Kingdom A research lab and consultancy in NLP and machine learning.
  • 2012–2018
    Management consultant Gartner and Accenture, Helsinki Technology and analytics strategy for high-tech and telecoms clients.
  • 2006–2011
    Software engineering and R&D management Nokia, Tieto and Valuatum

Contact

Email
aarne@talman.fi
CV
Curriculum vitae (PDF)
Google Scholar
Profile
ORCID
0000-0002-3573-5993
GitHub
aarnetalman
LinkedIn
talman
Research portal
University of Helsinki