I am a PhD candidate in the Digital Linguistics group, supervised by Prof. Dr. Lena A. Jäger and Prof. Dr. Rico Sennrich. Conducting research at the intersection of NLP and cognitive science, I am working on creating innovative solutions that enhance language model performance and interpretability. Currently, my research focusses on the cognitive alignment in language models and on diffusion models for synthetic eye movement generation.

ScanDL 2.0: A generative model of eye movements in reading synthesizing scanpaths and fixation durations,  ETRA 2025
Lena S. Bolliger, David R. Reich, Lena A. Jäger

New data on text reading in English as a second language,  Studies in Second Language Acquisition
Victor Kuperman, Sascha Schroeder, Cengiz Acartürk, Niket Agrawal, Dominick M. Alexandre, Lena S. Bolliger, Jan Brasser, ... and Noam Siegelman
[http |pdf |data |bib]

Proxy-Based Pre-Training for Eye-Tracking Applications,  ETRA 2025
David R. Reich, Cui Ding, Lena S. Bolliger, Patrick Haller, Paul Prasse, Lena A. Jäger

On the alignment of LM language generation and human language comprehension,  EMNLP/BlackboxNLP 2024
Lena S. Bolliger, Patrick Haller, Lena A. Jäger
[ http |bib]

EMTeC: A Corpus of Eye Movements on Machine-Generated Texts,  Behavior Research Methods
Lena S. Bolliger, Patrick Haller, Isabelle C. R. Cretton, David R. Reich, Tannon Kew,  Lena A. Jäger
[ arXiv preprint |data|bib]

On language models’ cognitive biases in reading time prediction, ICML workshop on Large Language Models and Cognition 2024
Patrick Haller, Lena S. Bolliger, and Lena A. Jäger
[pdf]

Language models emulate certain cognitive profiles: An investigation of how predictability measures interact with individual differences, ACL 2024
Patrick Haller, Lena S. Bolliger, and Lena A. Jäger
[http |pdf | bib]

An eye opener regarding task-based text gradient saliency, ACL/CMCL 2024
Guojun Wu, Lena S. Bolliger, David R. Reich, and Lena A. Jäger
[ http |bib]

ScanDL: A Diffusion Model for Generating Synthetic Scanpaths on Texts,  EMNLP 2023
Lena S. Bolliger, David R. Reich, Patrick Haller, Deborah N. Jakobi, Paul Prasse, Lena A. Jäger
[ http|Video|Poster|bib]

Introducing ScanDL: A diffusion-based generative model of eye movements in reading,  MathPsych/ICCM 2024 (Society for Mathematical Psychology and International Conference on Cognitive Modeling)
Lena S. Bolliger, David R. Reich, Patrick Haller, Deborah N. Jakobi, Paul Prasse, Lena A. Jäger