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