I lead the Natural Language Processing (NLP) Group at HITS gGmbH, Heidelberg, Germany. There, I am involved in NLP related projects, work with the computational linguists at HITS, and supervise PhD. students. In addition, I am Honorarprofessor in the Computational Linguistics Department at the University of Heidelberg.
The paper Fine-grained sentiment analysis with structural features (PDF) co-authored by Cäcilia Zirn, Mathias Niepert, Heiner Stuckenschmidt and myself received the Best Paper Award at IJCNLP 2011!
The results for the 2011 shared tasks were very encouraging for us. The HITS cross-lingual link discovery system (led by Angela Fahrni) won the NTCIR 9 shared task on Cross-lingual Link Discovery (linking English source documents to Korean, Chinese and Japanese target documents) hands down. We led 11 out of 18 evaluation metrics, winning all Wikipedia ground truth evaluation measures and even 4 of the manual assessment results. The HITS coreference resolution system (led by Jie Cai) made it to second place in the open setting of the CoNLL 2011 Shared Task on Coreference Resolution (ranked fourth over all settings, not significantly different from second and third).
I am tutorial chair at the 50th Annual Meeting of the ACL held on Jeju Island, Korea, in July 2012.
I am area chair for the area Discourse, Dialogue, and Pragmatics at the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2012) held in Avignon, France, in April 2012.
Together with Anette Frank, Stefan Riezler and Sebastian Padó I lead the PhD Colloquium in the CL Department at the University of Heidelberg. At the same time slot we also do the Computational Linguistics Colloquium.
I teach a class on Sentiment Analysis in the CL Department at the University of Heidelberg in the winter term 2011.
(This isn't really news ...) According to Google Scholar the AAAI '06 and AAAI '07 papers Simone Paolo Ponzetto and I co-authored are the most cited papers of the top conference in AI (Google Scholar query for AAAI 2006 and AAAI 2007)!
Linguistics:
Computational Linguistics:
Natural Language Processing:
Publications in Journals and Books, Conference Proceedings, Workshop Proceedings, and Complete List of Publications
See my publications at Google Scholar.
Send me email if you want to get a copy of a paper not linked on these pages (in those cases we had to transfer the copyright to the respective publishers; maybe linguists should follow the good example of JAIR and start to publish in open access journals).
I received my Ph.D. from the (now defunct) Computational Linguistics Department at the University of Freiburg, Germany, in December 1996 under the supervision of Udo Hahn. Between 1997 and 1999 I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. In 2000 I joined the European Media Lab in Heidelberg, Germany, as a researcher. Since 2001 I am group leader of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) Group of HITS, an institute which rapidly underwent several transformations before (hopefully) arriving at its final destination:
European Media Lab → EML Research → HITS.
Anyway, it has been a lot of fun to be here ...
In 2010 I got appointed Honorarprofessor in the Computational Linguistics Department at the University of Heidelberg.
