OBJECTIVE: To value EQ-5D health states by a general Dutch public. EQ-5D is a standardised questionnaire that is used to calculate quality-adjusted life-years for cost-utility analysis. DESIGN: Descriptive. METHOD: A sample of 309 Dutch adults from Rotterdam and surroundings was asked to value 17 EQ-5D health states using the time trade-off method. Regression analysis was applied to the valuations of these 17 health states. By means of the estimated regression coefficients, which together constitute the so-called Dutch tariff, valuations can be determined for all possible EQ-5D health states. These values reflect the relative desirability of health states on a scale where 1 refers to full health and 0 refers to death. Societal valuations are necessary in order to correct life-years for the quality of life. RESULTS: Complete data were obtained from 298 persons. Theywere representative for the Dutch population as far as age, gender and subjective health were concerned, but had a somewhat higher educational level. The estimated Dutch EQ-5D tariff revealed that the respondents assigned the most weight to (preventing) pain and anxiety or depression, followed by mobility, self-care and the activities of daily living. The Dutch tariff differed from the UK ('Measurement and Valuation of Health') tariff, which is currently used in Dutch cost-utility analyses. Compared to UK respondents, Dutch respondents assigned more weight to anxiety and depression and less weight to the other dimensions. Conclusion. The valuation of health states by this representative Dutch study group differed from the valuation that is currently used in Dutch cost-utility analyses.
We present the GPT-NL Public Corpus, the biggest permissively licensed corpus of Dutch language resources. The GPT-NL Public Corpus contains 21 Dutch-only collections totalling 36B preprocessed Dutch tokens not present in any other LLM pretraining corpus. Additionally, the corpus includes roughly 207B English, 232B Code, and 48B German/Danish tokens taken from existing sets which we further curated for compliance. This corpus includes curated data from large existing corpora like Common Corpus and Common Crawl, as well as newly created Dutch-specific collections. Most newly created Dutch collections consist of content collected in collaboration with organisations or synthetically augmented content. All data is collected and evaluated with the aim of facilitating the creation of (commercial) language models that are lawful, useful and non-harmful. All data included in the GPT-NL Public Corpus is sourced from datasets with permissive licensing and is curated and redistributed under a CC-BY license. The full dataset is publicly available on the Hugging Face Hub.
Recent years have seen growing interest in applying neural networks and contextualized word embeddings to the parsing of historical languages. However, most advances have focused on dependency parsing, while constituency parsing for low-resource historical languages like Middle Dutch has received little attention. In this paper, we adapt a transformer-based constituency parser to Middle Dutch, a highly heterogeneous and low-resource language, and investigate methods to improve both its in-domain and cross-domain performance. We show that joint training with higher-resource auxiliary languages increases F1 scores by up to 0.73, with the greatest gains achieved from languages that are geographically and temporally closer to Middle Dutch. We further evaluate strategies for leveraging newly annotated data from additional domains, finding that fine-tuning and data combination yield comparable improvements, and our neural parser consistently outperforms the currently used PCFG-based parser for Middle Dutch. We further explore feature-separation techniques for domain adaptation and demonstrate that a minimum threshold of approximately 200 examples per domain is needed to effectively enhan
Medical conversations offer insights into clinical communication often absent from Electronic Health Records. However, developing reliable clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP) models is hampered by the scarcity of domain-specific datasets, as clinical data are typically inaccessible due to privacy and ethical constraints. To address these challenges, we present a pipeline for generating synthetic Dutch medical dialogues using a Dutch fine-tuned Large Language Model, with real medical conversations serving as linguistic and structural reference. The generated dialogues were evaluated through quantitative metrics and qualitative review by native speakers and medical practitioners. Quantitative analysis revealed strong lexical variety and overly regular turn-taking, suggesting scripted rather than natural conversation flow. Qualitative review produced slightly below-average scores, with raters noting issues in domain specificity and natural expression. The limited correlation between quantitative and qualitative results highlights that numerical metrics alone cannot fully capture linguistic quality. Our findings demonstrate that generating synthetic Dutch medical dialogues is fe
Syllabification describes the task of dividing words into syllables. Due to many rules and exceptions, training an algorithm to perform syllabification with high accuracy remains a challenge. Throughout the last decades, different algorithms have been put forth for Dutch syllabification, yet a comprehensive comparative assessment has not been done. Additionally, deep learning has gained significant popularity within NLP in recent years, yet no modern deep-learning based framework has been developed for Dutch orthographic syllabification. Finally, phonetic and orthographic syllabification algorithms have been examined separately, but not in combination. The aim of the current research was twofold: (a) to examine the performance of existing Dutch syllabification algorithms, and (b) to investigate whether combining phonetic and orthographic information into a single model can increase syllabification performance. To compare the performance of algorithms, four algorithms (Brandt Corstius, Liang, Trogkanis-Elkan (CRF), and a newly conceived deep-learning model) were applied to three different datasets (dictionary words, loanwords, pseudowords). The algorithms show varying performance ac
\textbf{Background:} Dutch medical corpora are scarce, limiting NLP development. \\ \textbf{Methods:} We translated English datasets, identified medical text in generic corpora, and extracted open Dutch medical resources. \\ \textbf{Results:} The resulting corpus comprises $\pm$ 35 billion tokens across the medical domain in about 100 million documents, freely available on Hugging Face. \\ \textbf{Conclusion:} This work establishes the first large-scale Dutch medical language corpus for pre-training and downstream NLP tasks.
In the nineteenth century, the Dutch established time signals in their Atlantic colonies to synchronise maritime navigation with European standards. In Paramaribo (Suriname), a sophisticated sequence of apparatus -- including time balls, noon guns, discs and flags -- operated from 1851 until World War I. Naval officers aboard guard ships used sextants equipped with artificial horizons to determine local noon, thus integrating the colony into the global Greenwich-based cartographic system. This infrastructure was not merely technical; it became a civic ritual, with the daily noon gun structuring urban life and becoming a point of political negotiation between naval commanders and the colonial governor. In contrast, the Dutch Caribbean islands employed simpler, pragmatic systems. Curaçao used a daily time flag, a cost-effective solution suited to its climate and harbour scale, while smaller islands like Aruba and St. Eustatius relied on occasional noon guns. This diversity reflected a decentralised colonial administration that adapted technologies to local conditions and budgets. The history of these time signals reveals a process of hybrid adaptation, not simply replication of Europ
Numerous studies have proposed computational methods to detect hate speech online, yet most focus on the English language and emphasize model development. In this study, we evaluate the counterfactual fairness of hate speech detection models in the Dutch language, specifically examining the performance and fairness of transformer-based models. We make the following key contributions. First, we curate a list of Dutch Social Group Terms that reflect social context. Second, we generate counterfactual data for Dutch hate speech using LLMs and established strategies like Manual Group Substitution (MGS) and Sentence Log-Likelihood (SLL). Through qualitative evaluation, we highlight the challenges of generating realistic counterfactuals, particularly with Dutch grammar and contextual coherence. Third, we fine-tune baseline transformer-based models with counterfactual data and evaluate their performance in detecting hate speech. Fourth, we assess the fairness of these models using Counterfactual Token Fairness (CTF) and group fairness metrics, including equality of odds and demographic parity. Our analysis shows that models perform better in terms of hate speech detection, average counterf
Recently, embedding resources, including models, benchmarks, and datasets, have been widely released to support a variety of languages. However, the Dutch language remains underrepresented, typically comprising only a small fraction of the published multilingual resources. To address this gap and encourage the further development of Dutch embeddings, we introduce new resources for their evaluation and generation. First, we introduce the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark for Dutch (MTEB-NL), which includes both existing Dutch datasets and newly created ones, covering a wide range of tasks. Second, we provide a training dataset compiled from available Dutch retrieval datasets, complemented with synthetic data generated by large language models to expand task coverage beyond retrieval. Finally, we release a series of E5-NL models compact yet efficient embedding models that demonstrate strong performance across multiple tasks. We make our resources publicly available through the Hugging Face Hub and the MTEB package.
Milionis et al.(2023) studied the rate at which automated market makers leak value to arbitrageurs when block times are discrete and follow a Poisson process, and where the risky asset price follows a geometric Brownian motion. We extend their model to analyze another popular mechanism in decentralized finance for onchain trading: Dutch auctions. We compute the expected losses that a seller incurs to arbitrageurs and expected time-to-fill for Dutch auctions as a function of starting price, volatility, decay rate, and average interblock time. We also extend the analysis to gradual Dutch auctions, a variation on Dutch auctions for selling tokens over time at a continuous rate. We use these models to explore the tradeoff between speed of execution and quality of execution, which could help inform practitioners in setting parameters for starting price and decay rate on Dutch auctions, or help platform designers determine performance parameters like block times.
Warning: This paper contains explicit statements of offensive stereotypes which might be upsetting. Language models are prone to exhibiting biases, further amplifying unfair and harmful stereotypes. Given the fast-growing popularity and wide application of these models, it is necessary to ensure safe and fair language models. As of recent considerable attention has been paid to measuring bias in language models, yet the majority of studies have focused only on English language. A Dutch version of the US-specific CrowS-Pairs dataset for measuring bias in Dutch language models is introduced. The resulting dataset consists of 1463 sentence pairs that cover bias in 9 categories, such as Sexual orientation, Gender and Disability. The sentence pairs are composed of contrasting sentences, where one of the sentences concerns disadvantaged groups and the other advantaged groups. Using the Dutch CrowS-Pairs dataset, we show that various language models, BERTje, RobBERT, multilingual BERT, GEITje and Mistral-7B exhibit substantial bias across the various bias categories. Using the English and French versions of the CrowS-Pairs dataset, bias was evaluated in English (BERT and RoBERTa) and Fren
Biomedical entity linking, a main component in automatic information extraction from health-related texts, plays a pivotal role in connecting textual entities (such as diseases, drugs and body parts mentioned by patients) to their corresponding concepts in a structured biomedical knowledge base. The task remains challenging despite recent developments in natural language processing. This paper presents the first evaluated biomedical entity linking model for the Dutch language. We use MedRoBERTa.nl as base model and perform second-phase pretraining through self-alignment on a Dutch biomedical ontology extracted from the UMLS and Dutch SNOMED. We derive a corpus from Wikipedia of ontology-linked Dutch biomedical entities in context and fine-tune our model on this dataset. We evaluate our model on the Dutch portion of the Mantra GSC-corpus and achieve 54.7% classification accuracy and 69.8% 1-distance accuracy. We then perform a case study on a collection of unlabeled, patient-support forum data and show that our model is hampered by the limited quality of the preceding entity recognition step. Manual evaluation of small sample indicates that of the correctly extracted entities, aroun
This paper introduces and evaluates three translations of the Grievance Dictionary, a psycholinguistic dictionary for the analysis of violent, threatening or grievance-fuelled texts. Considering the relevance of these themes in languages beyond English, we translated the Grievance Dictionary to Dutch, German, and Italian. We describe the process of automated translation supplemented by human annotation. Psychometric analyses are performed, including internal reliability of dictionary categories and correlations with the LIWC dictionary. The Dutch and German translations perform similarly to the original English version, whereas the Italian dictionary shows low reliability for some categories. Finally, we make suggestions for further validation and application of the dictionary, as well as for future dictionary translations following a similar approach.
This paper introduces Fietje, a family of small language models (SLMs) specifically designed for the Dutch language. The model is based on Phi 2, an English-centric model of 2.7 billion parameters. Fietje demonstrated competitive results with larger language models upon its release. A core emphasis of this work is transparency and reproducibility: Fietje is fully open-source, with model weights, datasets, training, and evaluation code all publicly accessible. The paper discusses the performance of Fietje and many other models on an extensive evaluation suite of benchmarks on reasoning, sentiment analysis, world knowledge, linguistic acceptability and word sense disambiguation. Evaluation results illustrate the rapid progress in the field of LLMs, where recent small models outperform older, larger models that were fine-tuned for Dutch. This trend signals an exciting future for Dutch language processing, suggesting that even compact LLMs are becoming increasingly capable. Furthermore, ongoing and future efforts to adapt LLMs to Dutch are poised to enhance these models even further, broadening their applicability and accessibility. Fietje is only an intermediate step in improving acce
We introduce the Dutch Model Benchmark: DUMB. The benchmark includes a diverse set of datasets for low-, medium- and high-resource tasks. The total set of nine tasks includes four tasks that were previously not available in Dutch. Instead of relying on a mean score across tasks, we propose Relative Error Reduction (RER), which compares the DUMB performance of language models to a strong baseline which can be referred to in the future even when assessing different sets of language models. Through a comparison of 14 pre-trained language models (mono- and multi-lingual, of varying sizes), we assess the internal consistency of the benchmark tasks, as well as the factors that likely enable high performance. Our results indicate that current Dutch monolingual models under-perform and suggest training larger Dutch models with other architectures and pre-training objectives. At present, the highest performance is achieved by DeBERTaV3 (large), XLM-R (large) and mDeBERTaV3 (base). In addition to highlighting best strategies for training larger Dutch models, DUMB will foster further research on Dutch. A public leaderboard is available at https://dumbench.nl.
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, their performance often lags in lower-resource, non-English languages due to biases in the training data. In this work, we explore strategies for adapting the primarily English LLMs (Llama-2 and Llama-3) to Dutch, a language spoken by 30 million people worldwide yet often underrepresented in LLM development. We collect 104GB of Dutch text ($32$B tokens) from various sources to first apply continued pretraining using low-rank adaptation (LoRA), complemented with Dutch posttraining strategies provided by prior work. For Llama-2, we consider using (i) the tokenizer of the original model, and (ii) training a new, Dutch-specific tokenizer combined with embedding reinitialization. We evaluate our adapted models, ChocoLlama-2, both on standard benchmarks and a novel Dutch benchmark, ChocoLlama-Bench. Our results demonstrate that LoRA can effectively scale for language adaptation, and that tokenizer modification with careful weight reinitialization can improve performance. Notably, Llama-3 was released during the course of this project and, upon evaluation, demonstrated s
This paper presents FinGEITje, the first Dutch financial Large Language Model (LLM) specifically designed and optimized for various financial tasks. Together with the model, we release a specialized Dutch financial instruction tuning dataset with over 140,000 samples, constructed employing an automated translation and data processing method. The open-source data construction method is provided, facilitating the creation of financial instruction datasets in different languages. To evaluate model performance, the study introduces the first Dutch financial evaluation benchmark, along with an automated evaluation method that utilizes an LLM as an independent evaluator, reducing manual intervention in performance evaluation. The experimental results highlight the superior performance of FinGEITje across five critical Dutch and English financial tasks.
Content monetization on social media fuels a growing influencer economy. Influencer marketing remains largely undisclosed or inappropriately disclosed on social media. Non-disclosure issues have become a priority for national and supranational authorities worldwide, who are starting to impose increasingly harsher sanctions on them. This paper proposes a transparent methodology for measuring whether and how influencers comply with disclosures based on legal standards. We introduce a novel distinction between disclosures that are legally sufficient (green) and legally insufficient (yellow). We apply this methodology to an original dataset reflecting the content of 150 Dutch influencers publicly registered with the Dutch Media Authority based on recently introduced registration obligations. The dataset consists of 292,315 posts and is multi-language (English and Dutch) and cross-platform (Instagram, YouTube and TikTok). We find that influencer marketing remains generally underdisclosed on social media, and that bigger influencers are not necessarily more compliant with disclosure standards.
The Dutch railway network is one of the busiest in the world, with delays being a prominent concern for the principal passenger railway operator NS. This research addresses a gap in delay prediction studies within the Dutch railway network by employing an XGBoost Classifier with a focus on topological features. Current research predominantly emphasizes short-term predictions and neglects the broader network-wide patterns essential for mitigating ripple effects. This research implements and improves an existing methodology, originally designed to forecast the evolution of the fast-changing US air network, to predict delays in the Dutch Railways. By integrating Node Centrality Measures and comparing multiple classifiers like RandomForest, DecisionTree, GradientBoosting, AdaBoost, and LogisticRegression, the goal is to predict delayed trajectories. However, the results reveal limited performance, especially in non-simultaneous testing scenarios, suggesting the necessity for more context-specific adaptations. Regardless, this research contributes to the understanding of transportation network evaluation and proposes future directions for developing more robust predictive models for del
Statutory article retrieval plays a crucial role in making legal information more accessible to both laypeople and legal professionals. Multilingual countries like Belgium present unique challenges for retrieval models due to the need for handling legal issues in multiple languages. Building on the Belgian Statutory Article Retrieval Dataset (BSARD) in French, we introduce the bilingual version of this dataset, bBSARD. The dataset contains parallel Belgian statutory articles in both French and Dutch, along with legal questions from BSARD and their Dutch translation. Using bBSARD, we conduct extensive benchmarking of retrieval models available for Dutch and French. Our benchmarking setup includes lexical models, zero-shot dense models, and fine-tuned small foundation models. Our experiments show that BM25 remains a competitive baseline compared to many zero-shot dense models in both languages. We also observe that while proprietary models outperform open alternatives in the zero-shot setting, they can be matched or surpassed by fine-tuning small language-specific models. Our dataset and evaluation code are publicly available.