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.

• Wladimir Sidorenko is developing an approach to extracting opinions and other subjective information from social media messages, so that the linguistic interaction between participants in social networks can be studied.

Completed dissertations

• 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.