TTLab – Text Technology Lab

The TTLab (Text Technology Lab), headed by Prof. Alexander Mehler, is part of the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics (Fachbereich Informatik und Mathematik) at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt. It investigates formal, algorithmic models to deepen our understanding of information processing in the humanities. We examine diachronic, time-dependent as well as synchronic aspects of processing linguistic and non-linguistic, multimodal signs. The Lab works across several disciplines to bridge between computer science on the one hand and corpus-based research in the humanities on the other. To this end, we develop information models and algorithms for the analysis of texts, images, and other objects relevant to research in the humanities.

News

  • New publications at KONVENS 2026

    by

    We are pleased to inform you that the following papers have been accepted for presentation at KONVENS 2026, which will take place from September 14–17, 2026:

    Mevlüt Bagci, Ali Abusaleh, Daniel Baumartz, Alexander Mehler, Giuseppe Abrami and Maxim Konca. 2026. Extending a Parliamentary Corpus with MPs’ Tweets: Automatic Annotation and Evaluation Using TTLABTWEETCORPUS. KONVENS 2026 – Context matters: NLP beyond Text. accepted.
    BibTeX
    @inproceedings{bagci:et:al:2026,
      title     = {Extending a Parliamentary Corpus with {MP}s{\textquoteright} Tweets:
                   Automatic Annotation and Evaluation Using {TTLABTWEETCORPUS}},
      author    = {Mevlüt Bagci and Ali Abusaleh and Daniel Baumartz and Alexander Mehler
                   and Giuseppe Abrami and Maxim Konca},
      booktitle = {KONVENS 2026 - Context matters: NLP beyond Text},
      year      = {2026},
      address   = {Hamburg (Germany)},
      keywords  = {Corpora, Tweets, Political Data, Text, Media classification},
      note      = {accepted}
    }

    Christoph Wigbels, Ali Abusaleh, Markus T. Jansen, Alexander Mehler, Manuel Schaaf and Markus J. Hofmann. 2026. Individual Text Corpora Predict User-Specific Knowledge: Benchmarks of Individualized Knowledge Simulation. KONVENS 2026 – Context matters: NLP beyond Text. accepted.
    BibTeX
    @inproceedings{Wigbels:et:al:2026:a,
      author    = {{Wigbels, Christoph and Abusaleh, Ali} and Jansen, Markus T. and Mehler, Alexander
                   and Schaaf, Manuel and Hofmann, Markus J.},
      title     = {Individual Text Corpora Predict User-Specific Knowledge: Benchmarks
                   of Individualized Knowledge Simulation},
      booktitle = {KONVENS 2026 - Context matters: NLP beyond Text},
      year      = {2026},
      address   = {Hamburg (Germany)},
      keywords  = {Individual Text Corpora, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Personalized Language Models, Probabilistic Calibration, Knowledge Benchmarks, Data Contamination, German NLP, spp, circlet},
      note      = {accepted}
    }

    Leon Hammerla, Bhuvanesh Verma and Alexander Mehler. 2026. RT-Seg: A Toolkit for Reasoning Trace Segmentation. KONVENS 2026 – Context matters: NLP beyond Text. accepted.
    BibTeX
    @inproceedings{Hammerla:etal:2026:c,
      title     = {RT-Seg: A Toolkit for Reasoning Trace Segmentation},
      author    = {Leon Hammerla and Bhuvanesh Verma and Alexander Mehler},
      booktitle = {KONVENS 2026 - Context matters: NLP beyond Text},
      year      = {2026},
      address   = {Hamburg (Germany)},
      keywords  = {neglab},
      note      = {accepted}
    }

  • New publications related to CORE C08

    by

    We are pleased to announce that the following articles have been accepted or have already been published:

    Sebastian Gombert, Sonja Hahn, Nico Andersen, Leon Camus, Zhifan Sun, Ngoc Nhu Hao Nguyen, Fabian Zehner, Longwei Cong, Alexander Mehler and Hendrik Drachsler. July, 2026. Rubrics as Semantic Subspaces: A Unified Approach to Rubric-based Constructed Response Scoring across Short Answers and Essays. Proceedings of the 21st Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2026), 624–634.
    BibTeX
    @inproceedings{Gombert:et:al:2026:a,
      title     = {Rubrics as Semantic Subspaces: A Unified Approach to Rubric-based
                   Constructed Response Scoring across Short Answers and Essays},
      author    = {Gombert, Sebastian and Hahn, Sonja and Andersen, Nico and Camus, Leon
                   and Sun, Zhifan and Nguyen, Ngoc Nhu Hao and Zehner, Fabian and Cong, Longwei
                   and Mehler, Alexander and Drachsler, Hendrik},
      editor    = {Kochmar, Ekaterina and Alhafni, Bashar and Bann{\`o}, Stefano
                   and Bexte, Marie and Burstein, Jill and Horbach, Andrea and Laarmann-Quante, Ronja
                   and Tack, Anais and Yaneva, Victoria and Yuan, Zheng},
      booktitle = {Proceedings of the 21st Workshop on Innovative Use of {NLP} for
                   Building Educational Applications ({BEA} 2026)},
      month     = {jul},
      keywords  = {core, core_c08},
      year      = {2026},
      address   = {San Diego, California, USA},
      publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
      url       = {https://aclanthology.org/2026.bea-1.44/},
      doi       = {10.18653/v1/2026.bea-1.44},
      pages     = {624--634},
      isbn      = {979-8-89176-409-5},
      pdf       = {https://aclanthology.org/2026.bea-1.44.pdf},
      abstract  = {Rubrics are the primary reference for manual scoring of constructed
                   responses, and there is growing interest in their use in automated
                   scoring methodologies. In this work, we propose Aspect-Grounded
                   Rubric{--}Answer Alignment (AGRAA), a rubric-based end-to-end
                   scoring framework that models rubric descriptors as latent aspect
                   spaces. Concretely, rubric descriptors are represented as low-dimensional
                   subspaces derived from contextualised transformer embeddings,
                   and student responses are scored according to how strongly their
                   representations align with these rubric-induced spaces relative
                   to the residual space outside them. This formulation provides
                   a geometrically grounded interpretation of rubric-based scoring
                   while enabling end-to-end training with standard transformer encoders.
                   We introduce three distinct architectural variants and evaluate
                   them on multiple short-answer and essay scoring datasets. Across
                   these tasks, AGRAA achieves predictive performance highly competitive
                   with strong neural and feature-based baselines. In addition, the
                   framework yields interpretable intermediate representations that
                   expose which rubric-defined aspects contribute to scoring decisions,
                   enabling decision-aligned explanations grounded in rubric descriptors.}
    }

    Sebastian Gombert, Gianluca Romano, Leon Camus, Daniel Baumartz, Fabiola Gonçalves Ribeiro, Alexander Mehler and Hendrik Drachsler. 2026. NeoBridge: A Scalable Platform for Assessment Orchestration and Log Data Collection in Online Reasoning Assessments. Proceedings of the Twenty-first European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning. accepted.
    BibTeX
    @inproceedings{Gombert:et:al:2026:b,
      author    = {Gombert, Sebastian and Romano, Gianluca and Camus, Leon and Baumartz, Daniel
                   and Gon{\c{c}}alves Ribeiro, Fabiola and Mehler, Alexander and Drachsler, Hendrik},
      title     = {{NeoBridge}: A Scalable Platform for Assessment Orchestration
                   and Log Data Collection in Online Reasoning Assessments},
      booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twenty-first European Conference on Technology
                   Enhanced Learning},
      series    = {ECTEL 2026},
      address   = {Valencia, Spain},
      year      = {2026},
      keywords  = {core, core_c08},
      eventdate = {2026-09-14/2026-09-18},
      note      = {accepted}
    }

  • New Publication at NALOMA 2026

    by

    We are pleased to inform you that the following paper has been accepted at the 6th NALOMA (NAtural Language Meets LOgic and MAchine Learning) workshop, co-located with ESSLLI from August 3–7 in Prague.

    Leon Lukas Hammerla and Alexander Mehler. August, 2026. Negation in Reasoning Traces: Interpretable Signals of Correctness and Provenance. Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Natural Language Meets Logic and Machine Learning (NALOMA), 19–39.
    BibTeX
    @inproceedings{Hammerla:Mehler:2026:b,
      title     = {Negation in Reasoning Traces: Interpretable Signals of Correctness
                   and Provenance},
      author    = {Hammerla, Leon Lukas and Mehler, Alexander},
      editor    = {Yanaka, Hitomi and Abzianidze, Lasha},
      booktitle = {Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Natural Language Meets Logic
                   and Machine Learning ({NALOMA})},
      month     = {aug},
      year      = {2026},
      address   = {Prague, Czechia},
      publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
      url       = {https://aclanthology.org/2026.naloma-1.4/},
      pages     = {19--39},
      isbn      = {979-8-89176-389-0},
      abstract  = {Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is widely used in large language
                   models (LLMs), but the resulting reasoning traces remain underexplored.We
                   study these traces through the lens of discourse-level negation.Specifically,
                   we distinguish between corrective negation, which rejects a prior
                   reasoning step, and refining negation, which narrows or qualifies
                   it, and introduce metrics to quantify their use in human- and
                   LLM-authored reasoning traces.Across multiple benchmarks, we find
                   that negation occurs much more frequently in intermediate reasoning
                   traces than in final response texts.We then test whether negation-based
                   features provide predictive and descriptive signal for correctness,
                   model identity, and human-vs.-LLM authorship.For correctness prediction,
                   negation-based features consistently outperform simple structural
                   baselines and in several settings add complementary signal to
                   embedding-based representations, although embeddings remain stronger
                   overall.In a controlled comparison on correct human and LLM traces
                   from the same dataset, our strongest results arise in human-vs.-LLM
                   classification, where negation features outperform both structural
                   and embedding baselines.Overall, these findings position discourse-level
                   negation as an interpretable feature for reasoning-trace analysis,
                   with especially strong utility for provenance-related classification
                   and modest but consistent value for correctness prediction.}
    }

Sign up to our mailing list to receive news updates.

Click here to see all recent news.