Rico Sennrich in "UZHmagazin"

At this year’s ACL conference in July, Rico Sennrich was honoured with the Test of Time Award, which recognizes groundbreaking contributions to fundamental research whose impact and relevance endure a decade after publication. 

The UZHmagazin 3/2026 has published a profile of Rico Sennrich, making the significance of his research accessible to a wider audience. This is especially fitting, as the research for which he and his team recently received the ACL Test of Time Award has had an impact far beyond academia. Originally developed for machine translation, the paper Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units introduced a subword tokenization method that became a foundational component of virtually all modern large language models. As a result, technologies based on this research are now used by millions of people every day.

As any good profile does, the article also offers a glimpse of the person behind these scientific achievements, allowing students and colleagues to get to know him from a different perspective.

Read the article here (in German): Rico Sennrich in UZHmagazin 3/26 (PDF, 1 MB)