Jan Bakker

Hi! I am a second-year PhD candicate at the University of Amsterdam.

My research is part of the HAICu project , which deploys Artifical Intelligence to make digital heritage collections more accessible. Specifically, my research focusses on using large language models to improve information access. This includes scientific text simplification, automatic humour analysis, and efficient retrieval-augmented generation.

I am part of the AI, Culture, and Society (AIC&S) research unit at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC). My supervisors are Jaap Kamps and David Graus.

Highlighted Publications

BioCLEAR Benchmark for Biomedical Text Simplification. Jan Bakker, Liana Ermakova, and Jaap Kamps. In SIGIR ‘26: Proceedings of the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval.
Section-Level Simplification of Biomedical Abstracts. Jan Bakker and Jaap Kamps. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025).
Cochrane-auto: An Aligned Dataset for the Simplification of Biomedical Abstracts. Jan Bakker and Jaap Kamps. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility and Readability (TSAR 2024).
Beyond Sentence-level Text Simplification: Reproducibility Study of Context-Aware Document Simplification. Jan Bakker and Jaap Kamps. In Proceedings of the Workshop on DeTermIt! Evaluating Text Difficulty in a Multilingual Context @ LREC-COLING 2024.

See my Google Scholar profile for a full list of my publications.

Posters

I have presented my poster Section-Level Simplification of Biomedical Abstracts at EMNLP 2025!

Teaching

I have been a teaching assistant for the following courses:

Interpretability & Explainability in AI (2026)

Co-developed a workshop on Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval.
Collaborated with the teaching team; taught lab sessions; graded presentations and workshop reports.

Machine Learning and Language Models (2025)

Gave a guest lecture on the automatic simplification of scientific texts.
Taught lab sessions; graded notebooks, project reports, and exams.

Thesis supervision

I have been the main supervisor of the following students:

Master students

2026: Pascal Mathas and David Carranza
2025: Taiki Papandreou

Bachelor students

2026: Jesse van Bakel, Robin Flier, Ezra Smink
2025: Alecsandru Kreefft-Libiu, Finley Helms, Cem Selçuk

Other services

Reviewing

ACL Rolling Review - March 2026 cycle & May 2026 (EMNLP) cycle.
Joint Workshop on Readability and Text Simplification (READIxTSAR) 2026.

Co-organizing

Education

PhD in Artificial Intelligence. ILLC, University of Amsterdam. 2024 - current.
MSc in Artificial Intelligence. University of Amsterdam. 2022 - 2024. Cum Laude.
BSc in Computer Science. University of Amsterdam. 2019 - 2022. GPA: 8.7.
Pre-university education. Tabor College Oscar Romero. 2012 - 2019. Cum Laude.

Contact

You can find my e-mail address on my recent publications via Google Scholar.