Nils Holzenberger

nils dot holzenberger at telecom-paris dot fr

Assistant Professor at Télécom Paris in the DIG team

HiringIn the mediaPublicationsExperienceTeaching

LAB SESSION

If you have access to the IP Paris Moodle, do the lab session there. There is a form to fill in with your answers.

Otherwise, click here for the slides and materials for the lab session. Put your answers to the questions (to be found in QUESTIONS.txt) in a pdf file, with your name on it, and email it to me.

The deadline for this assignment is Friday, Sep 19, 2pm.

Hiring

I am generally interested in highly motivated and self-driven M1 or M2 students for internships. If your research interests align with mine, feel free to get in touch.

In the media

Publications [dblp profile]

My main research aim is to develop algorithms that can spot inconsistencies and loopholes in tax law. Below is a list of research topics, with selected publications. For an exhaustive list of publications, please refer to my DBLP and Google Scholar profiles. Some resources can be found here.

Shelter Check

Andrew Blair-Stanek, Benjamin Van Durme and I are working towards finding loopholes in tax law.

Can LLMs Identify Tax Abuse? [paper]
Andrew Blair-Stanek, Nils Holzenberger and Benjamin Van Durme
arXiv preprint, Aug 10, 2025

Shelter Check: Proactively Finding Tax Minimization Strategies via AI [paper]
Andrew Blair-Stanek, Nils Holzenberger and Benjamin Van Durme
Tax Notes Federal, Dec. 12, 2022

NLLP has made huge strides, especially since the advent of Large Language Models. I've built benchmarks for NLLP and tested LLMs on legal reasoning.

CLERC: A Dataset for U. S. Legal Case Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Analysis Generation [paper]
Abe Bohan Hou, Orion Weller, Guanghui Qin, Eugene Yang, Dawn Lawrie, Nils Holzenberger, Andrew Blair-Stanek and Benjamin Van Durme
NAACL (Findings) 2025

The Factuality of Large Language Models in the Legal Domain [paper]
Rajaa El Hamdani, Thomas Bonald, Fragkiskos D. Malliaros, Nils Holzenberger and Fabian M. Suchanek
CIKM 2024

LegalBench: A Collaboratively Built Benchmark for Measuring Legal Reasoning in Large Language Models [paper]
Neel Guha et al
NeurIPS 2023 Datasets and Benchmarks

Connecting Symbolic Statutory Reasoning with Legal Information Extraction [paper] [resources]
Nils Holzenberger and Benjamin Van Durme
Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop, December 7, 2023, Singapore

OpenAI Cribbed Our Tax Example, But Can GPT-4 Really Do Tax? [paper]
Andrew Blair-Stanek, Nils Holzenberger and Benjamin Van Durme
Tax Notes Federal, August 14, 2023

Agent-based modeling

As an alternative to direct analysis of legal authorities via NLP, loopholes can be found by building a simulation of the legal system and letting RL-driven agents find creative combinations of laws.

Can AI expose tax loopholes? Towards a new generation of legal policy assistants [paper]
Peter Fratrič, Nils Holzenberger, David Restrepo Amariles
arXiv March 21, 2025

Rules2Lab: from Prolog Knowledge-Base, to Learning Agents, to Norm Engineering [paper]
Peter Fratric, Nils Holzenberger and David Restrepo Amariles
EUMAS 2024

Education/Research Experience

Assistant Professor at Télécom Paris, Palaiseau, France, February 2023 - Present

PhD Candidate at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA, September 2017 - November 2022

Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms with Yoshua Bengio, Montréal, Canada, April - July 2017

Master's at Mines ParisTech (École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris), Paris, France, September 2013 - July 2017

CoML with Emmanuel Dupoux, École Normale Supérieure (ENS Ulm), Paris, France, May - September 2016

Carnegie Mellon University with Florian Metze, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, December 2015 - May 2016

IBM Watson, Littleton, MA, USA, June - November 2015

ENDLab with Tom Peacock, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA, September 2014 - February 2015

TE-VSC group, CERN Technology Department, Meyrin, Switzerland, February 2014

Classe préparatoire MPSI/MP, Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Paris, France, September 2011 - July 2013