News

09/24: Computational Linguistics Fall School 2024
Two weeks of intense CL input for 35 international students - it's a great crowd!

09/24: Zlata @ SIGDial in Kyoto
Zlata presents our paper 'Question Type Prediction in Natural Debate' at SIGDial 2024!

08/24: Nette teaching 'NLP: From Language to Information'
Eight days of teaching the most interdisciplinary group I ever had at the Sommerakademie of the Max Weber-Program (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) in Ljubljana!

07/24: ECAI workshop paper accepted
A new strand of research coming out of CoRNLP, namely on ithe automatic identification of misinformation, with collaborators Bruna Paz Schmid and Steve Oswald (Université de Fribourg, Switzerland) and accepted at the ECAI 2024 workshop on 'Countering Disinformation with Artificial Intelligence'.

07/24: SIGDIAL paper accepted
Looking forward to presenting our paper 'Question Type Prediction in Natural Debate' at SIGDIAL in Kyoto in September. Authors are Zlata Kikteva, Alex Trautsch, Steffen Herbold and Nette Hautli-Janisz.

07/24: New work on LLM capabilities!
We're happy to announce our latest piece on assessing the capabilities of LLMs, this time on how good LLMs can impersonate politicians and other figures. Authors are Steffen Herbold, Alexander Trautsch, Zlata Kikteva and Nette Hautli-Janisz.

06/24: PIZ Fachbeirat (Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Unterricht und Kultus)
From September 2024 onwards, Nette will be member of the "Profilschule für Informatik und Zukunftstechnologien" (PIZ) Fachbeirat which promotes computer science and technology in Bavarian secondary schools - way to go!

06/24: Nette gives keynote at ARGAGE 2024
Looking forward to giving one of the keynotes at ARGAGE 2024 in Fribourg, CH, plus a presentation with Thierry Hermann, Université de Neuchâtel.

05/24: Nette @ OSSA2024 in Windsor, CA
Excited to talk about a paper by Erisa Bytyqi and me on 'The Facts Speak For Themselves': Fallacy Detection with GPT at OSSA 2024 in Canada. Also commenting on Oxana Pimenova's paper on argument continuity.

05/24: Nette invited to Liverpool Symposium
I'm very happy to give a talk on 'GAI 1 – humans 0: Assessing the structure of automatically generated persuasive essays' at the “GenAI, Language, and Society” symposium organised by Rudi Palmieri and Elena Musi at the University of Liverpool.

05/24: Program out for DELITE at LREC-Coling 2024!
Looking forward to an exciting mix of papers on current work on deliberation technology in Torino at DELITE2024!

05/24: Nette invited to INDIGO Digital Tag
Happy to meet up with industry representatives to talk about 'Large Language Models & natural language' at the INDIGO Digital Tag 2024.

05/24: Nette in ZEIT
Happy to contribute to an article in ZEIT Sprachen on assessing the capabilities of Large Language Models.

04/24: Nette talks at PasDas 2024
An invited talk on 'What Do Large Language Models Know About Language?" at PasDas 2024 - it was fun!

04/24: Zlata at In_equality conference and DeLab project meeting
Zlata presents our paper on 'Dimension of inequality in broadcast political debate' at the In_equality Conference in Konstanz and also attends the DeLab project meeting in Maastricht!

02/24: Framing workshop at DGfS2024!
Our workshop 'Towards Linguistically Motivated Computational Models of Framing' is happening at Bochum this week and we're delighted with the line-up, including the invited speakers Elena Musi and Manfred Stede!

02/24: LREC-Coling 2024 papers accepted
Nette and Wassiliki are co-authors on the paper 'PSE v0.1: The first open access corpus of public service encounters' coming out of the EXC and Giulia and colleagues got accepted with their paper "Segmentation of Complex Question Turns for Argument Mining: A Corpus-based Study in the Financial Domain".

02/24: Giulia D’Agostino on extended research stay in Passau
Giulia is a PhD student at Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano. In Passau she will work on identifying preferred routes of argumentation justifying questions and on the development of a cornering score for questions. Welcome Giulia!

02/24: Forbes cites CoRNLP work
In their 6 Feb article "Did You Use ChatGPT On Your School Applications? These Words May Tip Off Admissions", Forbes cites our Scientific Reports article.

01/24: Süddeutsche Zeitung covers our research
In a 30 Jan article on how AI changes human language, the SZ covers CoRNLP research and people.

12/23: Computational Linguistics Fall School 2024 in Passau
We're delighted to be hosting the next CL Fall School from 16-27 September 2024 in Passau! Courses and more details will be made available soon.

12/23: Zlata @ EMNLP2023
Happy to contribute to ArgMin 2023!

11/23: DELITE workshop @LREC2024
I'm co-organizing the First Workshop on Deliberation Technology at LREC2024 -- check out the website here!

10/23: Nature Scientific Report paper published
Happy to see our paper 'A large-scale comparison of human-written versus ChatGPT-generated essays' published in Scientific Reports! See here for the idw press release and some of the international uptake in the media.

10/23: ArgMining paper accepted
Looking forward to presenting our paper 'On the Impact of Reconstruction on Context for Argument Prediction in Natural Debate' at the EMNLP2023 Argument Mining workshop in Singapore!

10/23: Nette in PNP
Nette contributed to the Passauer Neue Presse article on 'Voice AI as Tool and Weapon' (Stimmen-KI als Werkzeug und Waffe) on October 16.

09/23: Nette at TRIOKON and Zlata in Fribourg, Switzerland
Nette joined the panel 'How robotics and AI change the world of work' at TRIOKON 2023, Zlata is on a research visit at the Université de Fribourg to meet up with colleagues Jennifer Schumann and Steve Oswald.

09/23: Zlata at SLE2023 in Athens
Zlata presents work with colleagues Jennifer Schumann and Steve Oswald (Univ. of Fribourg, Switzerland) on 'Incorporating cognitive evidence in a computational model for persuasiveness'.

09/23: Article in the Inequality Magazine
In 'Language and Power: Computational Analysis Can Help us Understand Inequalities in Communication' (pp. 24-29) we talk about the EXC's project most recent insights into how language reflects power in public service discourse.

09/23: Paper at AMLI2023
Ingrid Espinoza presents a paper coming out of the EXC project: 'Patterns of Exclusion and Discrimination in Street-level Bureaucracy: Using Language as an Indicator of Behavior to Understand Deservingness Preferences'. Way to go!

08/23: CfP for CL poster session at DGfS2024
We're inviting abstracts, see the call here: The more, the merrier!

07/23: Inaugural lecture
Looking forward to holding my inaugural lecture 'On the pitfalls of mining natural debate', followed by Steffen Herbold's talk 'A software engineer and a data scientist walk into a bar...', on 19 July 2023 at 2.15pm in HS4.

07/23: Nette and Zlata at ISSA2023
Happy to present our paper 'The 10.000-Argument Rule: Adequacy in Theories of Argument Structure'!

06/23: Nette in Passau lecture series on ChatGPT
There's going a talk on how natural automatically generated language is - looking forward to seeing many of you there.: Thurs 29 June, 6-8pm, HS13.

06/23: Nette at Excellence Cluster @uni.kn
We presented our ongoing research in the PSE project in the EXC's colloquium - it was fun to be back!

06/23: Nette in Nankai speaker series on argumentation
I'm looking forward to my online talk 'On the Role of Questions in Large-Scale Public Argumentation Data' at the College of Philosophy, Nankai University, China!

05/23: Preprint on ChatGPT performance
Excited to have pulled together forces at FIM to get this paper out - "AI, write me an essay: A large-scale comparison of human-written versus ChatGPT-generated essays" - see high-profile reaction here. More to follow!

05/23: DeLab meeting @ARG-tech
Another DeLab project meeting happening, this time @ARG-tech in sunny Scotland!

04/23: Nette@RUB
I'm happy to give a talk on 'QT30 and beyond: Argumentation in the wild' in the linguistics colloquium at Ruhr-Universität Potsdam and connecting to Tatjana Scheffler and her students!

03/23: Zlata in Warsow, Nette in Lisbon
Zlata was invited to join the workshop on 'Linguistically analysing polarisation on social media' at Warsow University of Technology. Nette is attending the closing event of the COST Action 'Public Policy Argumentation'.

03/23: Nette is Speaker of the DGfS SIG CL
At the annual meeting of the DGfS (German Society of Linguistics), Nette was elected Speaker of the SIG for Computational Linguistics.

02/23: Teaching at USI Lugano
Nette is teaming up with Chris Reed to teach a seminar on 'Argument mining in wild' in the Winter School on Corpus Data for the Analysis of Discourse, Interactions and Arguments at USI Lugano, Switzerland.

01/23: Article in 'Languages'
Nette has published joint work with Kasia and Chris on 'Conventional Implictures in Argumentation' in a Special Issue of 'Languages' edited by Steve Oswald (https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8010014)

10/22: Finite State Morphology @uni.passau
We're offering a block seminar on computational morphology from 4-8 October, open to Bachlor students in computer science and BA students in MUK. Check studIP for more information!

09/22: Paper in CODI workshop @COLING2022
The Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse features our paper 'The Keystone Role Played by Questions in Debate' - looking forward to Korea in October!

09/22: Paper at CPSS 2022
We're looking forward to presenting our paper 'Measuring Plain Language in Public Service Encounters' at CPSS2022 in Potsdam!

09/22: Argument analysis training
Interested in analyzing argumentation and contributing to cutting-edge research and commercial application? Then join our virtual argument analysis training from September 9-16 and complement a team of 40 analysts across Europe! For more information send email to Zlata Kikteva.

08/22: Article in 'Behörden Spiegel'
The PSE project is featured in the August edition of the 'Behörden Spiegel', the largest newspaper for public service officials in Germany, with the title "Kommunikation ist alles" ('Communication is everything') (p. 7).

06/22: Three papers accepted to ECA2022
Looking forward to presenting our work on a variety of aspects of modeling rhetorical strategies for debate at the European Conference on Argumentation in Rome in September 2022.

05/22: The second VEUK price winner in the group
After Wassiliki Siskou in 2019, Zlata Kikteva is the second PhD student in the group to win the University of Konstanz's prize for outstanding international MA students, awarded to Zlata in May 2022. Congratulations to both!

05/22: Article in 'International Public Management Journal'
Work that is coming out of the PSE Project, entitled 'A taxonomy of administrative language in public service encounters' (co-authors: Steffen Eckhard, Laurin Friedrich, Vanessa Müden, Ingrid Espinoza). More to follow!

05/22: Project meeting in Brussels
Another DeLab project meeting, this time at Maastricht University's Brussel campus - looking forward to seeing everyone in person again!

05/22: Chris Reed and Kamila Gorska are visiting
We're delighted to host two members of ARG-tech for a one-week research visit in Passau!

04/22: Two LREC 2022 papers
We're looking forward to presenting two papers at LREC 2022 in Marseille: A main conference paper /w oral presentation ("QT30: A corpus of argument and conflict in broadcast debate") and a workshop paper ("Disagreement space in argument analysis") in the Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP

03/22: Dagstuhl seminar "Framing in Communication: From Theories to Computation"
A great week of working with colleagues across disciplines on how to operationalise framing! The report is here.

01/22: In Passau now
I'm delighted to be starting my post as Junior Professor for Computational Rhetoric and Natural Language Processing.

12/21: Teaching @RUB
It was a pleasure to contribute an afternoon of 'Argumentation in political debate' in the seminar series on 'Digital analysis of large text corpora' at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

11/21: Article in the Journal of Pragmatics
In 'Questions in argumentative dialogue' we present a taxonomy for questioning that has been applied to corpora comprising over two million words and we yield statistical profiles that illustrate the rhetorical effect of questions in argumentative natural language.

11/21: ARGAGE conference
Katarzyna Budzynska, Chris Reed and me have a joint talk at the ARGAGE conference 2021 on 'What is too much implicitness in argumentation?'.

10/21: ARG-tech, Pindex and Stephen Fry on argument technology
ARG-tech has been working with Pindex on a new video that explains the context and motivation for a lot of work in argument technology. Stephen Fry narrates and opens with a discussion of some of the big societal challenges including conspiracy theories and fake news. The video is out now on on YouTube.

10/21: Teaching at University of Passau
Before my official start in January, I'm already offering two courses at the Faculty for Computer Science and Mathematics this semester: Information Retrieval & Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence (block seminar, March 2022). All materials are on Stud.IP. See you there!

08/21: DeLab starts, funded by the VolkswagenStiftung
DeLab is officially starting, running until 07/25, and we're looking forward to develop the 'Deliberation Laboratory', an environment to test the effect of different rhetorical strategies on debate quality on the web. Zlata Kikteva is the PhD student for the KN group. Looking forward!

06/21: Paper accepted at the UnImplicit workshop @ ACL 2021.
Looking forward to presenting our study on the variability of conventional implicated content in English and German at The First Workshop on Understanding Implicit and Underspecified Language, co-located with ACL 2021!

05/21: Professor for Computational Rhetorics and Natural Language Processing from 01/22 onwards
I'm delighted to be starting the next chapter of my academic life, joining the Faculty of Informatics and Mathematics at the University of Passau on 1 January 2022. I'm equally delighted that Zlata Kikteva and Wassiliki Siskou will join the fun as PhD students!

04/21: New semester @uni.kn, new courses.
I'm teaching AI and Grammar Development and offer a Research Colloquium this summer term - all materials are on Ilias. Looking forward to seeing many of your there!

03/21: Invited talk @ ILCC, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
Happy to speak about 'What is too much implicitness?' on 26 March as part of the ILCC seminar series and meet staff and students (at least virtually) - already looking forward to coming by in person again!

02/21: And another one! PSE project, starting in spring 2021, funded by the Excellence Cluster @uni.kn
Excited about a new PolSci collaboration with Steffen Eckhard on the linguistic analysis of street-level bureaucracy and the inequality inherent in it. See the webpage here.

01/21: New collaboration! MOU with the University of Verona
In this Memorandum of Understanding, I am teaming up with Roberta Facchinetti, Silvia Cavalieri and Sara Corrizzato from the University of Verona, Italy, on understanding and annotating the role of questions in a new corpus on political interviews. Biljana Scott joins the team as scientific advisor.

12/20: New project! Deliberation Laboratory (DeLab), funded by the VolkswagenStiftung, starting 04/2021.
I'm delighted to be part of DeLab, a project in the 'AI and the Society of the Future' call of the VolkswagenStiftung. We aim to develop a transformative online experimentation environment that will allow us to explore the nature, causes, and consequences of citizens’ perceptions in public, online dialogue across languages. More information to come soon!

11/20: New book! LingVis: Visual Analytics for Linguistics, edited by Miriam Butt, Annette Hautli-Janisz and Verena Lyding, CSLI Publications, Stanford
This volume collects landmark research in the burgeoning field of visual analytics for linguistics (LingVis). LingVis is motivated by the growing need within linguistic research for dealing with large amounts of complex, multidimensional data sets. An innovative exploration into the future of LingVis in the digital age, this foundational book both provides a representation of the current state of the field and communicates its new possibilities for addressing complex linguistic questions across the larger linguistic community.