Chief Research Scientist

Pierre Lison

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  • Chief Research Scientist at Norsk Regnesentral
  • Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Oslo.

About

My main research interests are in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, most specifically the training, alignment, and evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) along with their deployment in various applications. Over my research career, I’ve worked on topics such as spoken dialogue systems, large-scale information extraction, data privacy, neural machine translation and human-robot interaction. I’m particularly interested in research topics at the intersection between NLP and other fields, from natural to social sciences. I’m also involved in several innovation-focused R&D projects looking at the use of LLMs and machine learning to solve practical problems in the public or private sector. 

Background

I’m originally from Belgium and graduated from the University of Louvain in 2006 in Computer Science & Engineering. Becoming increasingly interested by the intersection of computer science and linguistics, I moved to Saarbrücken (Germany) to pursue a master degree in Language Science & Technology. I graduated in 2008 and went on to work as a researcher at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), where I was involved in several EU-funded projects on the development of dialogue systems for human-robot interaction. In 2011, I relocated to Norway to embark on a PhD in the Language Technology Group of the University of Oslo. In 2014, I defended my PhD thesis on probabilistic approaches to dialogue management and worked for two more years as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the same group on dialogue modelling for statistical machine translation. 

In 2016, I joined the Norwegian Computing Center (Norsk Regnesentral) as research scientist, where I work on various R&D projects related to natural language processing and machine learning. Two of my most recent projects are CLEANUP, which sought to develop new, data-driven methods for removing personal information from text data and GraphDial, which focused on dialogue management and investigated the use of knowledge graphs to represent the dialogue state of rich conversational domains. Other research projects I am / have been involved with include SAFERS (speech analytics for emergency response services), DialMT (dialogue modelling for machine translation), AICOM (linguistic analysis of human-LLM interactions), Oslo Analytics and most recently CyberRisk (cyber-threat intelligence and risk management).

In addition to my main position as Chief Research Scientist at NR, I also have an adjunct position as Associate Professor in the Language Technology Group of the University of Oslo, where I am involved in several courses in machine learning and natural language processing. I am also a former member of the Young Academy of Norway.

Projects

  • Machine learning
  • Language technology
  • Digital security and privacy

Semi-Automated Cyber Risk Management 
The image shows an illustrated robot against a brown background. Rudimentary illustration.
  • Machine learning

How do we understand machines that talk to us?

Publications

  • 154 publications found
  • Publisher

Incremental Dialogue Management: Survey, Discussion, and Implications for HRI arXiv, , 2025. Scientific article

Pragmatic Reasoning for Irony Detection With Large Language Models in English and Norwegian - SEMDIAL SemDial Proceedings, pp. 204 209 , (ISSN 2308-2275 ), doi: https://doi.org/https://www.semdial.org/anthology/Z25-Berg_semdial_4421.pdf , 2025. Scientific article

Re-identification of De-identified Documents with Autoregressive Infilling pp. 1192 1209 , doi: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.60 , 2025. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Retrieving Relevant Knowledge Subgraphs for Task-Oriented Dialogue pp. 513 526 , doi: https://doi.org/https://aclanthology.org/2025.sigdial-1.42.pdf , 2025. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Following Route Instructions using Large Vision-Language Models: A Comparison between Low-level and Panoramic Action Spaces pp. 449 463 , doi: https://doi.org/https://aclanthology.org/2025.icnlsp-1.43/ , 2025. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Evaluating the disclosure risk of anonymized documents via a machine learning-based re-identification attack Data mining and knowledge discovery, vol. 38, pp. 4040 4075 , (ISSN 1384-5810 1573-756X ), doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10618-024-01066-3 , 2024. Scientific article

Nå kan KI-generert tekst vannmerkes 2024. Article feature

Conversational Feedback in Scripted versus Spontaneous Dialogues: A Comparative Analysis pp. 440 457 , doi: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.sigdial-1.38 , 2024. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Automated de-identication of scanned patient records: Evaluation report 2024. Report

Publisher Norsk Regnesentral

Enhancing Naturalness in LLM-Generated Utterances through Disfluency Insertion arXiv, doi: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2412.12710 , 2024. Scientific article

Fire tiltak for en bedre språkpolitikk i akademia 2023. Article feature

Er prateroboten ChatGPT en klok samtale­partner eller papegøye? 2023. Article feature

GraphWOZ: Dialogue Management with Conversational Knowledge Graphs 2023. Scientific lecture

Identifying Token-Level Dialectal Features in Social Media , 2023. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Constructing a Knowledge Graph from Textual Descriptions of Software Vulnerabilities in the National Vulnerability Database pp. 386 391 , , 2023. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Who's in Charge? Roles and Responsibilities of Decision-Making Components in Conversational Robots 2023. Scientific lecture

Generation of Replacement Options in Text Sanitization pp. 292 300 , , 2023. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Alt du kan lære om statistisk modellering og maskinlæring på en dag 2023. Lecture

Alt du kan lære om statistisk modellering og maskinlæring på en dag 2023. Lecture

Pierre Lison; Samia Touileb; Chat GPT egner seg dårlig til eksamenssensuren Morgenbladet, (ISSN 0805-3847 0806-2617 ), 2023. Article feature

Retrieval-Augmented Neural Response Generation Using Logical Reasoning and Relevance Scoring SemDial Proceedings, (ISSN 2308-2275 ), , 2023. Scientific article

Pierre Lison; Venn med kunstig intelligens 2023. Media interview

Pierre Lison; Kunstig Intelligens, en fare for menneskeheten? 2023. Media interview

Michael Riegler; Pierre Lison; Ingrid Lossius Falkum; Kunstig intelligens-modeller er ikke miniatyr­versjoner av den menneskelige hjernen Forskersonen.no, 2023. Article feature

Pierre Lison; Samia Touileb; Chat GPT egner seg dårlig til eksamenssensuren Morgenbladet, 2023. Article feature

Helse-effektivisering - et mulig satsningsområde for NR 2023. Report

Publisher Norsk Regnesentral

A Graph-to-Text Approach to Knowledge-Grounded Response Generation in Human-Robot Interaction arXiv, , 2023. Scientific article

The GDPR and Unstructured Data: Is Anonymisation Possible? International Data Privacy Law (IDPL), vol. 12, pp. 184 206 , (ISSN 2044-3994 2044-4001 ), doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/idpl/ipac008 , 2022. Scientific article

Kjernekraft -er det farlig, eller er det fremtiden? 2022. Article feature

Dis, c'est quoi l'intelligence artificielle? (ISSN 9782507057299 ), 2022. Popular science book

Publisher Renaissance Du Livre

Anonymization of sensitive information 2022. Lecture

Problemer på kontoret: Alltid jeg som må trakte kaffe 2022. Article feature

Bootstrapping Text Anonymization Models with Distant Supervision pp. 4477 4487 , , 2022. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Dialogue Management as Graph Transformations pp. 219 227 , doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5538-9_15 , 2022. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Automatic Evaluation of Disclosure Risks of Text Anonymization Methods pp. 157 171 , doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13945-1_12 , 2022. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

The text anonymization benchmark (TAB): A dedicated corpus and evaluation framework for text anonymization Computational Linguistics, vol. 48, pp. 1053 1101 , (ISSN 0891-2017 1530-9312 ), doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00458 , 2022. Scientific article

Hvilket fremmedspråk bør man lære seg i Google-oversettelsenes tidsalder? 2022. Article feature

Neural Text Sanitization with Explicit Measures of Privacy Risk pp. 217 229 , , 2022. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Hva er universell utforming? 2022. Media participation

Towards an AI-driven talking avatar in virtual reality for investigative interviews of children pp. 9 15 , doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/3534085.3534340 , 2022. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Anonymisation Models for Text Data: State of the art, Challenges and Future Directions pp. 4188 4203 , doi: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.323 , 2021. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

skweak: Weak Supervision Made Easy for NLP pp. 337 346 , doi: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.acl-demo.40 , 2021. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Anonymisation Models for Text Data: State of the art, Challenges and Future Directions 2021. Scientific lecture

Anonymisation Models for Text Data: State of the art, Challenges and Future Directions 2021. Scientific lecture

skweak: weak supervision made easy for NLP 2021. Poster

Assessing the Quality of Human-Generated Summaries with Weakly Supervised Learning pp. 112 123 , , 2021. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Dinesh Lala; Pierre Lison; Proceedings of the 1st RobotDial Workshop on Dialogue Models for Human-Robot Interaction , 2021. Report

Publisher RobotDial workshop

Skweak: Weak Supervision Made Easy for NLP 2021. Scientific lecture

Fremdrift i forskningsprosjekter 2021. Lecture

Forvirrende pandemistatistikk: Hva skal vi med logaritmer i grafer? , 2021. Article feature

Nicholas Thomas Walker; Torbjørn Dahl; Pierre Lison; Dialogue Management as Graph Transformations 2021. Scientific lecture

Vi må snakke om Bitcoin , 2021. Article feature

Pierre Lison; Jørgen Bølstad; Anders Kvellestad; Hva skal vi med logaritmer i grafer? Morgenbladet, (ISSN 0805-3847 0806-2617 ), 2021. Article feature

Welcome to Norway! , 2021. Article feature

Språkteknologi: siste trender og vanlige fallgruver 2021. Lecture

Predicting insurance fraud with the help of a sentiment analysis model 2021. Report

Publisher Norsk Regnesentral

Developing NLP models without labelled data using weak supervision 2020. Lecture

Pierre Lison; Jeremy Barnes; Aliaksandr Hubin; Samia Touileb; Named Entity Recognition without Labelled Data: A Weak Supervision Approach (ISSN 978-1-950737-48-2 ), 2020. Scientific anthology / conference series

Publisher Association for Computational Linguistics

Named Entity Recognition without Labelled Data: A Weak Supervision Approach pp. 1518 1533 , , 2020. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Episode 5: Hva er språkteknologi (eller NLP)? Med Pierre Lison 2020. Media participation

Episode 6: Kan språkteknologi virkelig forstå språk? Med Ingrid Lossius Falkum og Pierre Lison 2020. Media participation

Kan kunstig intelligens "forstå" språk? Aftenposten (morgenutg. : trykt utg.), (ISSN 0804-3116 0807-2027 ), , 2020. Science for the public article

Named Entity Recognition without Labelled Data: A Weak Supervision Approach 2020. Scientific lecture

For enkelt om kunstig intelligens: – Diskriminerende og fordomsfull AI er ikke alltid lett å løse Forskning.no, (ISSN 1891-635X 1891-6341 ), , 2020. Reader opinion

Hva skjedde med «Don’t be evil»? , 2020. Article feature

Ethical and social impacts of AI 2020. Lecture

Modellering av omdømme i cybersikkerhet med nevralske nettverk 2019. Lecture

PyOpenDial: A Python-based Domain-Independent Toolkit for Developing Spoken Dialogue Systems with Probabilistic Rules pp. 187 192 , doi: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D19-3032 , 2019. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Modélisation du dialogue: contrôle du dialogue et corpus multilingues 2019. Scientific lecture

Dialogue Modelling: Small data, Big data 2019. Scientific lecture

Data-driven models of reputation for cybersecurity 2019. Scientific lecture

Open challenges in anonymisation 2019. Lecture

Laurent Prévot; Pierre Magistry; Pierre Lison; Should we use movie subtitles to study linguistic patterns of conversational speech? A study based on French, English and Taiwan Mandarin 2019. Scientific lecture

Tekstmining: En kort innføring , 2018. Lecture

OpenSubtitles 2018: Statistical rescoring of sentence alignments in large, noisy parallel corpora pp. 1742 1748 , , 2018. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Detecting Machine-translated Documents in Large Parallel Corpora pp. 25 32 , , 2018. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Modélisation du dialogue : systèmes de dialogue parlé et corpus multilingues , 2018. Scientific lecture

Detecting Machine-translated Subtitles in Large Parallel Corpora 2018. Scientific lecture

Neural models for predicting the reputation of end-point hosts 2018. Scientific lecture

Data-driven models of reputation in cyber-security , 2018. Scientific lecture

OpenSubtitles 2018: Statistical Rescoring of Sentence Alignments in Large, Noisy Parallel Corpora , 2018. Scientific lecture

SAFERS: Talegjenkjenning og maskinlæring for nødmeldetjenester , 2018. Lecture

Anonymisering av rettsavgjørelser 2018. Report

Publisher Norsk Regnesentral

SAFERS - Speech Analytics for Emergency Response Services. Kan taleteknologi og maskinlæring brukes for å effektivisere nødmeldetjenester? 2017. Lecture

Incremental Processing for Neural Conversational Models , 2017. Poster

Incremental Processing for Neural Conversational Models SemDial Proceedings, pp. 162 163 , (ISSN 2308-2275 ), , 2017. Scientific article

Automatic Detection of Malware-Generated Domains with Recurrent Neural Models Norsk Informasjonssikkerhetskonferanse (NISK), (ISSN 1893-6563 1894-7735 ), , 2017. Scientific article

Opptreden i God Morgen Norge (TV2) for å vise Lenny roboten som ble brukt ved Forskningstorget. 2017. Media participation

Redefining Context Windows for Word Embedding Models: An Experimental Study pp. 284 288 , , 2017. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Not All Dialogues are Created Equal: Instance Weighting for Neural Conversational Models pp. 384 394 , doi: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w17-5546 , 2017. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Neural Reputation Models learned from Passive DNS data pp. 3662 3671 , doi: https://doi.org/10.1109/BigData.2017.8258361 , 2017. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Not all dialogues are created equal: instance weighting for neural conversational models , 2017. Scientific lecture

Automatic Detection of Malware-Generated Domains with Recurrent Neural Models , 2017. Scientific lecture

Neural Reputation Models learned from Passive DNS Data 2017. Scientific lecture

Automatic Turn Segmentation for Movie and TV Subtitles , 2016. Poster

OpenDial: A Toolkit for Developing Spoken Dialogue Systems with Probabilistic Rules 2016. Poster

Automatic Turn Segmentation of Movie and TV Subtitles pp. 245 252 , doi: https://doi.org/10.1109/SLT.2016.7846272 , 2016. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Automatic Turn Segmentation for Movie and TV Subtitles , 2016. Scientific lecture

Dialogue modelling: small data and large data , 2016. Scientific lecture

Svetlana Stoyanchev; Pierre Lison; Srinivas Bangalore; Rapid Prototyping of Form-driven Dialogue Systems Using an Open-source Framework pp. 216 219 , doi: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w16-3626 , 2016. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Pierre Lison; Casey Kennington; OpenDial: A Toolkit for Developing Spoken Dialogue Systems with Probabilistic Rules pp. 67 72 , doi: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p16-4012 , 2016. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Paolo Dragone; Pierre Lison; Classification and Resolution of Non-Sentential Utterances in Dialogue Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics (IJCoL), pp. 45 62 24 , , 2016. Scientific article

Pierre Lison; Hybrid dialogue management + dialogue modelling for MT , 2016. Lecture

Pierre Lison; A short introduction to statistical machine translation , 2016. Lecture popular

Pierre Lison; OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles , 2016. Lecture

Pierre Lison; Jörg Tiedemann; OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles pp. 923 929 , , 2016. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Paolo Dragone; Pierre Lison; An Active Learning Approach to the Classification of Non-Sentential Utterances pp. 115 119 , doi: https://doi.org/10.4000/books.aaccademia.1464 , 2015. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Pierre Lison; Structured Probabilistic Modelling for Dialogue Management , 2015. Scientific lecture

Pierre Lison; Casey Kennington; Developing Spoken Dialogue Systems with the OpenDial toolkit , 2015. Poster

Paolo Dragone; Pierre Lison; Non-sentential utterances in dialogue: experiments in classification and interpretation , 2015. Poster

Paolo Dragone; Pierre Lison; Non-sentential utterances in dialogue: experiments in classification and interpretation SemDial Proceedings, pp. 170 172 , , 2015. Scientific article

Pierre Lison; Casey Kennington; Developing Spoken Dialogue Systems with the OpenDial Toolkit SemDial Proceedings, pp. 194 196 , , 2015. Scientific article

Pierre Lison; A hybrid approach to dialogue management based on probabilistic rules Computer Speech and Language, pp. 232 255 , doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csl.2015.01.001 , 2015. Scientific article

Publisher Elsevier

Pierre Lison; Structured Probabilistic Modelling for Dialogue Management 2014. Scientific lecture

Pierre Lison; Raveesh Meena; Spoken Dialogue Systems: A New Frontier in Human-Computer Interaction ACM Crossroads, 2014. Science for the public article

Michal Kajetan Kosek; Pierre Lison; An Intelligent Tutoring System for Learning Chinese with a Cognitive Model of the Learner 2014. Poster

Michal Kajetan Kosek; Pierre Lison; An Intelligent Tutoring System for Learning Chinese with a Cognitive Model of the Learner pp. 179 184 , doi: https://doi.org/10.14705/rpnet.2014.000214 , 2014. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Pierre Lison; Structured Probabilistic Modelling for Dialogue Management , 2014. Doctor dissertat

Publisher Universitetet i Oslo

Pierre Lison; Model-based Bayesian Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Management , 2013. Scientific lecture

Pierre Lison; Model-based Bayesian Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Management Interspeech, , 2013. Scientific article

Publisher International Speech Communication Association

Pierre Lison; Kan man snakke med en robot? , 2013. Lecture popular

Pierre Lison; Dr. Utenlansk , 2013. Media interview

Towards Online Planning for Dialogue Management with Rich Domain Knowledge doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8280-2_11 , 2013. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Probabilistic Dialogue Models with Prior Domain Knowledge pp. 179 188 , , 2012. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Probabilistic Dialogue Models with Prior Domain Knowledge , 2012. Scientific lecture

Pierre Lison; Raveesh Meena; Proceedings of the 8th Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems (YRRSDS 2012) , 2012. Report

Publisher YRRSDS committee

Dialogue Management with Probabilistic Rules , 2012. Scientific lecture

Towards Online Planning for Dialogue Management with Rich Domain Knowledge doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8280-2_11 , 2012. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Pierre Lison; Marta Recasens; Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop at the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ISSN 9781937284190 ), 2012. Scientific anthology / conference series

Publisher Association for Computational Linguistics

Social Robotics , 2012. Lecture

An Introduction to Machine Learning , 2012. Scientific lecture

Lenny, en robot som lærer å snakke , 2012. Lecture

Lenny, en robot som lærer å snakke , 2012. Lecture

openDial: A toolkit for building dialogue systems based on probabilistic rules , 2012. Poster

Declarative Design of Spoken Dialogue Systems with Probabilistic Rules SemDial Proceedings, (ISSN 2308-2275 ), , 2012. Scientific article

Pierre Lison; Kan roboter lære seg selv å snakke med mennesker? , 2012. Media interview

openDial: a dialogue systems toolkit based on probabilistic rules , 2012. Poster

Towards Dialogue Management in Relational Domains , 2012. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Multi-policy Dialogue Management , 2011. Poster

Multi-Policy Dialogue Management pp. 294 300 , , 2011. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Multi-Policy Dialogue Management , 2011. Poster

Belief modelling for situation awareness in human-robot interaction 2010. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Self-Understanding and Self-Extension: A Systems and Representational Approach IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, vol. 2, pp. 282 303 , (ISSN 1943-0604 ), 2010. Scientific article

Continual processing of situated dialogue in human-robot collaborative activities 2010. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Towards Relational POMDPs for Adaptive Dialogue Management 2010. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Towards relational POMDPS for adaptive dialogue management 2010. Scientific lecture

Situated Dialogue Processing for Human-Robot Interaction 2010. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Robust Processing of Spoken Situated Dialogue - A Study in Human-Robot Interaction (ISSN 9783836691130 ), 2010. Scientific monograph

Publisher Diplomica Verlag

Policy activation for open-ended dialogue management 2010. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

A salience-driven approach to speech recognition for human-robot interaction 2010. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Robust processing of situated spoken dialogue 2009. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Robust processing of situated spoken dialogue 2009. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Efficient parsing of spoken inputs for human-robot interaction 2009. Scientific chapter / article / conference article

Salience-driven contextual priming of speech recognition for human-robot interaction 2008. Scientific chapter / article / conference article