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 publication in the proceedings of “Sinn und Bedeutung” coming soon

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    Referential Transparency Theory (RTT) now also covers mass nouns!

    The authors argue that much of the work on pluralities and mass nouns in in so-called modern semantic theories primarily seeks to mitigate the effects of mereotopological domains. They therefore abandon such domains in favor of the RTT system, extended by a novel quantitative semantic type Stuff. Crucial notions such as cumulative and divisive reference emerge naturally from this independently motivated setup. Rather idiosyncratic internal parthood relations of nominal expressions are appropriately captured in lexical entries.

    Andy Lücking and Jonathan Ginzburg. 2025. Postmodern Quantification with Stuff. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, 29. Forthcoming.
    BibTeX
    @inproceedings{Luecking:Ginzburg:2025-mass-nouns,
      title     = {Postmodern Quantification with Stuff},
      author    = {Lücking, Andy and Ginzburg, Jonathan},
      booktitle = {Proceedings of \textit{Sinn und Bedeutung}},
      volume    = {29},
      series    = {SuB'29},
      year      = {2025},
      pubstate  = {forthcoming},
      note      = {Forthcoming}
    }

  • New publication accepted at NAACL 2025

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    Our paper, “Towards Unified, Dynamic, and Annotation-based Visualizations and Exploration of Annotated Big Data Corpora with the Help of Unified Corpus Explorer,” has been accepted to the Systems Demonstrations Track of the 2025 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2025).

    In this paper, we present our open-source Unified Corpus Explorer (UCE)—a generic corpus explorer in the form of a web portal that takes UIMA-annotated data from any domain and dynamically builds itself around it. This results in an interactive corpus explorer with semantic search, visualizations, document reading capabilities, Wikidition hypertext generation, and chatbot integration.

    Kevin Bönisch, Giuseppe Abrami and Alexander Mehler. 2025. Towards Unified, Dynamic and Annotation-based Visualisations and Exploration of Annotated Big Data Corpora with the Help of Unified Corpus Explorer. 2025 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics – System Demonstration Track. accepted.
    BibTeX
    @inproceedings{Boenisch:et:al:2025,
      title     = {Towards Unified, Dynamic and Annotation-based Visualisations and
                   Exploration of Annotated Big Data Corpora with the Help of Unified
                   Corpus Explorer},
      author    = {Kevin B{\"o}nisch and Giuseppe Abrami and Alexander Mehler},
      booktitle = {2025 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association
                   for Computational Linguistics -- System Demonstration Track},
      year      = {2025},
      keywords  = {uce,biofid},
      note      = {accepted}
    }
  • RTT at WSK

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    Referential Transparency Theory, mainly developed by lab member Andy Lücking, is honored with its own entry in the upcoming Dictionary on Semantics and Pragmatics Wörterbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft (WSK) — Semantik und Pragmatik. Watch out for updates!

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