Here you can find a bit more information about my PhD topic and things related to it, including information about previous seminars and the papers that I plan to include in it. For more information about my project, feel free to check out my website.

A Brief Blurb

From the abstract of my halfway seminar:

Algorithmic accountability has been an ever-expanding field in AI for the last decade. Two heavily-interlinked topics in this field are bias and fairness. The former studies how (unwanted) social biases are reflected in machine learning systems and how they affect them. On the other hand, the latter studies how these biases can affect downstream application of these systems.

Despite all of the potential interactions with other subfields of NLP, we still see most of the bias and fairness research being done both in relative isolation (rather than focusing on how it interacts with the different fields) and within a relatively limited set of notions of bias.

The first part of this talk will focus on how we can explore semantic and grammatical representations of biases in language models. Later on, I will explain how I’ve been exploring NLP for second language learning as a case study of how biases can be studied within a specific field of NLP. I will then talk about other forays I have done throughout my PhD into different areas of algorithmic accountability and the connections they have with my current topic. Finally, the talk will close with some of the future directions in which I would like to take my research.

Seminars and Presentations

• Final Seminar
  • Date: February 23rd, 2026 (planned)
  • Opponent: Beáta Megyesi
• Halfway Seminar
  • Title: “From Algorithms to Classrooms: NLP for Second Language Learning as a Case Study for Bias and Fairness in AI”
  • Date: November 18th, 2024
  • You can find the slides for the presentation here
• Idea Seminar
  • Title: “Using the Flow of Information to Detect False News”
  • Date: January 23rd, 2023
  • You can find the slides for the presentation here

Papers Included in the Thesis

• Tom Södahl Bladsjö, Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez. “Introducing MARB — A Dataset for Studying the Social Dimensions of Reporting Bias in Language Models”. 6th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing, co-located with ACL 2025. (link)

• Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Simon Dobnik, Elena Volodina. “Harnessing GPT to Study Second Language Learner Essays: Can We Use Perplexity to Determine Linguistic Competence?”. BEA 2024 Workshop, co-located with NAACL 2024. (link)

• Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, David Alfter, Simon Dobnik, Maria Irena Szawerna, Elena Volodina. “Jingle BERT, Jingle BERT, Frozen All the Way: Freezing Layers to Identify CEFR Levels of Second Language Learners Using BERT”. NLP4CALL 2024. (link)

• Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Simon Dobnik, Maria Irena Szawerna, Therese Lindström Tiedemann, Elena Volodina. “Did the Names I Used within My Essay Affect My Score? Diagnosing Name Biases in Automated Essay Scoring”. CALD-Pseudo Workshop, co-located with EACL 2024. (link)

• Upcoming paper on the effects of L1 on CEFR classification (in progress)

One of the potential issues issues when using GitHub as a file storage system is that every commit contains info about all of the previous files. This can cause a lot of bloat, especially when having lots of images. A way to get around this is to use Gists to host the files as they have their own commit history.

The other issue is that repos for GitHub pages must be public. This makes it very easy to clone or download the repo and rip all pictures directly from there. Gists are somewhere between a private and a public repo. Only the owner of the Gist has direct access to all the files at once, but each individual file has a link associated that can be used to either share or embed the files. This also makes it harder to do a mass rip of all the files or images in the website at once, as people doing so would have to download each separately.

If you were linking to anything in my website and this update broke links on your side, reach out to me and I can send you the updated links. These new links should be permalinks unless GitHub changes the way that Gists work.

For a while now I have been thinking of adding post functionalities to show some of my pictures and hobbies. I read up on how to do it, did some implementation tests, and then… nothing. It wasn’t until recently that two situations led me to finally making this post.

We had a small art exhibition at the department. The idea was that each of us could take something that we’ve made to share it with our coworkers. I love taking pictures but I had also been postponing doing the whole postprocessing bit. So I decided to work on some of my pictures to show them in this event.

Me putting up my prints at the lunch room, photo by Staffan Melin

The other reason is that a friend asked me to. I posted an Instagram story with a crappy picture of my photos hanging on the curtain. A friend from back home asked if I could share a link to my pictures and I answered that I would work on that and send her the link. Lo and behold, there is a section on my website for pictures now.

The photo I uploaded to Instagram

I selected eleven pictures to print from my time as a PhD so far. They are divided into three themes that I tend to photograph: landscapes, street art, and animals. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did taking and editing them.

At the Edge of the World

We traveled via ferry to the Faroe Islands to present at NoDaLiDa back in 2023. The whole trip and its leadup was very eventful to say the least, but that’s a story for another place and another time. You don’t find yourself in that region of the world every day, so we decided to go on a roadtrip after the conference.

To simply say that the Faroe Islands are a remote place would be an understatement. You can feel the sheer magnitude of the elements all around you. We drove around for several days and we arrived to the northernmost point of the islands on the last full day of our trip.

It felt as if we were standing at the edge of the world.

I sat down to take it all in. Once the impression subsided, I took a picture in hopes of capturing a fragment of that sentiment.

“At the Edge of the World” by Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Hattarvík, Faroe Islands (2023)

Street Art

we tend to favor certain themes when taking pictures. One of my recurrent themes is street art. I think public art in general is a reflection of what matters to a culture but also shapes our day-to-day experiences. I find it fascinating, to say the least.

I am taking a rather liberal definition of the term street art for this post, though. I think art in public spaces would be a better term, as it also encompasses other forms of expression such as scupltures, graffitti, and whatever the fish is supposed to be. I will eventually make separate posts as each of them is interesting in its own way.

“Yeah, I’ll get some sleep after the deadline” by Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Bologna, Italy (2022)

“Welcome to Gothenburg” by Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Gothenburg, Sweden (2023)

Photo by Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Bologna, Italy (2022)

Photo by Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Vilnius, Lithuania (2025)

Photo by Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Malta (2024)

Photo by Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Marseille, France (2022)

Animals

Another common theme in my pictures are animals and how they interact with human-made environments.

Cats in particular are fun to photograph: they either just chill there, not caring about the world, or act as if people noticing them is a direct threat to their existence. Either way, these reactions are steered and shaped both by the urban environment and by how often and in which ways humans interact with them.

Even though cats are one of the bastions of human culture throughout the ages, other animals are also fun to take pictures of. While driving around during the aforementioned trip across the Faroe Islands, we would often come across sheep that stood in the middle of the road, uncaring. We had to either drive around them or wait until they decided to move on. This led to one of my favorite photographs I’ve taken so far.

Photo by Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Faroe Islands (2023)

Photo by Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Dubrovnik, Croatia (2023)

Photo by Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Vilnius, Lithuania (2025)

Conclusion

These pictures were taken with intent and chosen not only for the aesthetics, but also because they hold meaning to me. This can be something as small as finding a cat peacefully lying on a windowsill after a long day of walking through bustling streets, to witnessing impressive sights of nature, to fun moments with friends. I could tell a story for each of these pictures as I did for the first one, but I decided to not focus on that for now. I might come back at some photos from this collection later on and elaborate a bit more on these stories. I hope you enjoyed my pictures and my ramblings as much as I enjoyed creating them.