Dr. M. Theune | People Pages: Find employees & contact details

I studied linguistics/computational linguistics at the University of Utrecht (1995), and completed a PhD degree in natural language generation at the Eindhoven University of Technology (2000). After that I joined the University of Twente as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2003, I obtained a personal research grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) to investigate the joint generation of language and gesture by embodied conversational agents, and I was appointed as an assistant professor at the research group Human Media Interaction.

Expertise

Computer Science
- User
- Conversational Agent
- Robot
- Roles
- Contexts
- Models
- Virtual Humans
- Serious Game

Organisations

Having a background in (computational) linguistics, I am interested in interaction with technology through language. This involves computers that can understand and produce human language (natural language processing and generation). For embodied conversational agents --both virtual characters and robots-- this also includes nonverbal behaviour. Interactive storytelling and serious games are also within my field of interest.

Publications

2025

Measuring and implementing lexical alignment: A systematic literature review (2025)Computer Speech and Language, 90. Article 101731. Srivastava, S., Wentzel, S. D., Catala, A. & Theune, M.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csl.2024.101731

2024

Leveraging Annotator Disagreement for Text Classification (2024)[Working paper › Preprint]. ArXiv.org. Xu, J., Theune, M. & Braun, D.http://10.48550/arXiv.2409.17577Leveraging Annotator Disagreement for Text Classification (2024)In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Natural Language and Speech Processing (ICNLSP 2024) (pp. 1-10). Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). Xu, J., Theune, M. & Braun, D.https://aclanthology.org/2024.icnlsp-1.1Exploring Lexical Alignment in a Price Bargain Chatbot (2024)In CUI '24: Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces. Article 40. Association for Computing Machinery. Zhao, Z., Theune, M., Srivastava, S. & Braun, D.https://doi.org/10.1145/3640794.3665576Trust in a Human-Computer Collaborative Task With or Without Lexical Alignment (2024)In UMAP Adjunct '24: Adjunct Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (pp. 189-194). Association for Computing Machinery. Srivastava, S., Theune, M., Catalá, A. & Reed, C.https://doi.org/10.1145/3631700.3664868Nudges to mitigate confirmation bias during web search on debated topics: support vs. manipulation (2024)ACM transactions on the web, 18(2), 1-27. Article 27. Rieger, A., Draws, T., Theune, M. & Tintarev, N.https://doi.org/10.1145/3635034From Potential to Practice: Intellectual Humility During Search on Debated Topics (2024)In CHIIR '24: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (pp. 130-141). ACM Publishing. Rieger, A., Bredius, F., Theune, M. & Pera, M. S.https://doi.org/10.1145/3627508.3638306Examining Lexical Alignment in Human-Agent Conversations with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 Models (2024)In Chatbot Research and Design: 7th International Workshop, CONVERSATIONS 2023 Oslo, Norway, November 22–23, 2023 Revised Selected Papers (pp. 94-114) (Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Vol. 14524). Springer. Wang, B., Theune, M. & Srivastava, S.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54975-5_6

2023

An embodied conversational agent coach to support societal participation learning by low-literate users (2023)Universal access in the information society, 22(4), 1215-1241. Schouten, D. G. M., Deneka, A. A., Theune, M., Neerincx, M. A. & Cremers, A. H. M.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-021-00865-5Vocabulary Acquisition in New and Learned Contexts Using Immersive Virtual Reality (2023)In Proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Games Based Learning (pp. 69-77) (Proceedings of the European Conference on Games Based Learning ; Vol. 17). Bergsma, T., Theune, M. & Delden, R. v.https://doi.org/10.34190/ecgbl.17.1.1499

Research profiles

The courses I teach mostly deal with language and computers (Natural Language Processing and Conversational Agents). I also supervise numerous Bachelor and Master students in thesis research and other projects.

Affiliated study programs

Courses academic year 2025/2026

Courses in the current academic year are added at the moment they are finalised in the Osiris system. Therefore it is possible that the list is not yet complete for the whole academic year.

Courses academic year 2024/2025

Courses academic year 2023/2024

My current projects focus on the question how we can automatically generate language (either text or dialogue) in different styles and in an adaptive fashion. I am involved the ALP project on affective language generation (together with Tilburg University); the POSTHCARD project on narrative simulations for Alzheimer caregivers, and as a project leader in the Data2Game project on adaptive and personalized serious games.

Address

University of Twente

Citadel (building no. 09), room H223
Hallenweg 15
7522 NH Enschede
Netherlands

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