
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Torsten Zesch
ChairholderMail: torsten.zesch@uni-due.de
Tel: +49 (0)203 379-2006
Office: LE 411
Research Interests
- Educational Natural Language Processing
- Exercise Generation / Difficulty Prediction
- Automated Scoring
- L1-Influence
- Social Media Analysis
- Stance Detection
- Robust Pre-processing
- Language Technlogy Infrastructure
- Replicablity / Reproducibility
Short Bio
- 2014 - Appointed Professor of Language Technology at University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
- 2013 - Substitute Professor (Vertretungsprofessur) “Language Technology”, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
- 2012 - Substitute Professor (Vertretungsprofessur) “Knowledge Mining & Assessment”, German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF), Frankfurt, Germany
- 2009 - Dr.-Ing. degree from Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
- 2005 - Diploma in computer science from the Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany.
Professional Activities
- Co-president German Society for Computational Linguistics & Language Technology (GSCL)
- Co-director, Institut für Optionale Studien (IOS), Unversity of Duisburg-Essen
- I am a regular member of the program committees of all major NLP conferences and journals including ACL, NAACL, EACL, EMNLP, COLING, LREC, NLDB, RANLP, JLRE, JNLE, ...
Selected Projects
- 2018 - 2020: DFG SPP RATIO - "Argument-Based Decision Support for Recommender Systems (ASSURE)"
- 2016 - 2020: BMBF "Bildungsgerechtigkeit im Fokus"
- 2015 -2020: DFG Research Training Group "User-centred social media"
- 2014 - 2018: DFG Scientific Network "INDUS - Individualized Language Learning"
Organization of Events
- GermEval 2017 "Shared Task on Aspect-based Sentiment in Social Media Customer Feedback" - Organizer
- GSCL 2015 - General Chair
- SemEval 2014, 2015, 2016 - General Chair
- GSCL 2013 - Program Chair
- Semeval-13 Subtask 5b "Evaluating Phrasal Semantics" - Organizer
Selected Talks
- Upcoming - May 2018: Keynote at EALTA 2018
- January 2017: Invited Talk TestDaF Institut, Ruhr-Universität Bochum - "Sprachtechnologische Ansätze zur zielgerichteten Generierung von Sprachlern- und Sprachtestitems"
- May 2016: Keynote at Workshop on “Normalisation and Analysis of Social Media Texts (NormSoMe)” at LREC, Portoroz, Slovenia - „Your noise is my research question! - Limitations of normalizing social media data”
- October 2015: Invited Talk - Centre for Language Technology, Göteborg, Schweden. Presentation at the 6th annual workshop of the CLT
- August 2014: Invited Talk - Educational Testing Service (ETS), Princeton, USA - “Automatically Determining the Difficulty of the C-Test Language Proficiency Test”
Misc
- Winning Team – Semantic Text Similarity Challenge at SemEval 2012. Best result among 35 international teams
- GitHub page
- Google Scholar page
Publications
6 results
2018 | |
[6] | The Role of Diacritics in Increasing the Difficulty of Arabic Lexical Recognition Tests , In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on NLP for Computer Assisted Language Learning at SLTC 2018 (NLP4CALL 2018), 2018. |
[5] | A flexible online system for curating reduced redundancy language exercises and tests , In Future-proof CALL: language learning as exploration and encounters short papers from EUROCALL 2018 (Peppi Taalas, Juha Jalkanen, Linda Bradley, Sylvie Thouësny, eds.), 2018. |
[4] | Comparing Target Sets for Stance Detection: A Case Study on YouTube Comments on Death Penalty , In Proceedings of the Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS), 2018. |
[3] | Do Women Perceive Hate Differently: Examining the Relationship Between Hate Speech, Gender, and Agreement Judgments , In Proceedings of the Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS), 2018. |
[2] | Agree or Disagree: Predicting Judgments on Nuanced Assertions , In Proceedings of the Seventh Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM), 2018. |
[1] | Quantifying Qualitative Data for Understanding Controversial Issues , In Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), 2018. |