Tobias Norlund

Stockholm / Sweden

Natural Language Processing (NLP) researcher and practitioner since 2015.

Skills

NLP

Text generation (large scale Transformer-based language modeling), Text classification (multi-label, multi-class), Semantic similarity (document/word representation, search), Text clustering (topic modelling)

Data Science

Deep Learning (text, images, structured data), Recommendation systems (collaborative filtering, content based, hybrid), Probabilistic/Statistical models, A/B testing

Technologies

Python (PyTorch, Tensorflow, numpy, scipy, pandas, scikit-learn, spaCy), Large-scale distributed computing (Tensorflow multi-gpu / tpu, Spark), Deploying Machine Learning to production (Docker, Kubernetes, Convox, AWS), Development tools (git, Docker, jupyter, linux), Frontend development (React, JavaScript), .NET (C#, ASP.NET), JVM (java, scala)

Languages

English (professional), Swedish (native)

Education

Degree of Licentiate of Engineering, Chalmers University, Sweden

2020 - 2023
Licentiate Thesis: Improving Language Models Using Augmentation and Multi-Modality

Master of Science: Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering, Linköping University, Sweden

2010 - 2016
Master: Signal and Image Processing
Master's Thesis: The Use of Distributional Semantics in Text Classification Models

Exchange semester, ETH Zürich

2015
Various courses in statistics and machine learning, including Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Learning and Intelligent Systems, Computational Statistics and Computational Intelligence Lab

Publications

Ehsan Doostmohammadi, Tobias Norlund, Marco Kuhlmann, Richard Johansson. Surface-Based Retrieval Reduces Perplexity of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models, Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2023

Tobias Norlund, Ehsan Doostmohammadi, Richard Johansson, Marco Kuhlmann. On the Generalization Ability of Retrieval-Enhanced Transformers, Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023.

Agnes Stenbom, Mattias Wiggberg, Tobias Norlund. Exploring Communicative AI: Reflections from a Swedish Newsroom, Digital Journalism, 2021.

Tobias Norlund, Lovisa Hagström, Richard Johansson. Transferring Knowledge from Vision to Language: How to Achieve it and how to Measure it?. Proceedings of the Fourth BlackboxNLP Workshop on Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP, 2021.

Tobias Norlund, Agnes Stenbom. Building a Swedish Open-Domain Conversational Language Model. Proceedings of the 23rd Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa), 2021.

Tobias Norlund, David Nilsson, Magnus Sahlgren. Parameterized context windows in Random Indexing. Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP, 2016.

Work Experience

  • Industrial PhD candidate / Recorded Future / Sept, 2020 – Present

    I envision a future where language technologies are deeply embedded in society, where it allows for a seamless interface between humans and technology in various shapes and forms. Towards that end, I research methods for improving current language representations, with a particular emphasis on grounding, sample efficiency and interpretability.

  • Data Scientist / Schibsted Media Group / Mar, 2016 – Sept, 2020

    Schibsted is among the biggest media groups in the nordics. I worked as Data Scientist in Schibsted’s central Machine Learning / NLP team, on various ML/NLP related use cases including: 1) Media content enrichment: Providing tag suggestions to articles and videos 2) Message intent classification on Schibsted marketplaces 3) Product and category classification for price comparison site Prisjakt 4) Algorithms for optimizing and personalizing the frontpage news feed for Schibsted publishers 5) Robot journalism through natural language generation 6) Video recommendation systems.

  • Master’s Thesis / Gavagai / Sept, 2015 – Feb, 2016

    Researched novel ways of parameterizing pre-trained Random Indexing word embeddings, that can later be fine-tuned for downstream NLP tasks. Resulted in accepted workshop paper at ACL 2016, see Publications.

  • Software Engineer (internship) / SICK IVP / Jun, 2014 – Aug, 2014

    Worked with software development and in particular computer graphics and WebGL. Designed multi-touch gestures for 3D object manipulation on tablet devices. Hands-on experience with Google Web Toolkit, WebGL and Java. The work required thorough computer graphics and linear algebra skills as well as ability to quickly get into existing code bases.

  • CEO / FotoBroderi.se / Jan, 2008 – present

    FotoBroderi.se allows you to create a custom Do-It-Yourself (DYI) cross stitch embroidery kit, based on an image of your choosing. The service uses image processing and color quantization algorithms to transform images to embroideries with world class quality. Developed solely by myself, mainly during high school and early undergraduate years, the project has teached me valueable entrepreneurial as well as full-stack programming skills.