Research

Our research currently revolves around the following topics:

• Argumentation Mining is the automatic search for arguments in text, and the automatic derivation of the argument's structure.
• Coreference Resolution seeks to determine which nominals in a text refer to the same entity. This includes figuring out what pronouns ("she" etc.) refer to.
• Corpora and Annotation Technology comprises tools for producing annotations to text manually, and those for executing queries on such annotated corpora.
• Discourse Structure and Discourse Parsing is the theoretical investigation of what makes a text "coherent", and the automatic analysis of such structures.
• Sentiment Analysis looks for opinions in text and tries to compute their structure: WHO has WHICH opinion on WHAT.
• Social Media processing deals with the peculiarities of automatically handling text from Twitter and other social media.

Ongoing dissertations

• Berfin Aktaş is examining the differences and similarities in the usage of referential devices between social media texts and other genres of written and spoken media.

• Peter Bourgonje is developing a shallow discourse parser for German.

• Yulia Clausen is examining the role of German tag questions in discourse variability in social media and spoken language.

• René Knaebel is working on applying deep learning to discourse parsing.

• Robin Schäfer is working on the automatic recognition of argumentation structure in Twitter data.

Completed dissertations

• Wladimir Sidorenko: Sentiment analysis of German Twitter. 2019. Degree in (Computational) Linguistics.

• Yulia Grishina: Assessing the applicability of annotation projection methods for coreference relations. 2019. Degree in (Computational) Linguistics.

• Andreas Peldszus: Automatic recognition of argumentation structure in short monological text. 2017. Degree in (Computational) Linguistics.

• Anastasia Linnik: Coherence and structure in aphasic and non-aphasic discourse. 2017. Degree in Linguistics.

• Oliver Gros: Computergestützte Wissensextraktion aus Befundtexten der Pathologie. 2014. Degree in Computer Science.

• Julia Ritz: Discourse-givenness of noun phrases: Theoretical and computational models. 2013. Degree in (Computational) Linguistics.

• Jörn Kreutel: Modellbasierte Entwicklung von Voice User Interfaces. 2010. Degree in Computer Science.

• Christian Chiarcos: Mental salience and grammatical form. 2010. Degree in (Computational) Linguistics.

• Christiane Hümmer: Synonyme bei phraseologischen Einheiten - eine korpusbasierte Untersuchung. 2007. Degree in (Computational) Linguistics.