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
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Two publications accepted at IJCNLP-AACL
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The following publications were accepted at the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing & Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (IJCNLP-AACL):
2025. Standardizing Heterogeneous Corpora with DUUR: A Dual Data- and Process-Oriented Approach to Enhancing NLP Pipeline Integration. Proceedings of 2025 International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing & Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (IJCNLP-AACL-Findings). accepted.BibTeX@inproceedings{Hammerla:et:al:2025a, author = {Hammerla, Leon and Mehler, Alexander and Abrami, Giuseppe}, title = {Standardizing Heterogeneous Corpora with DUUR: A Dual Data- and Process-Oriented Approach to Enhancing NLP Pipeline Integration}, booktitle = {Proceedings of 2025 International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing & Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (IJCNLP-AACL-Findings)}, year = {2025}, note = {accepted}, keywords = {neglab} }2025. D-Neg: Syntax-Aware Graph Reasoning for Negation Detection. Proceedings of 2025 International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing & Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (IJCNLP-AACL-Findings). accepted.BibTeX@inproceedings{Hammerla:et:al:2025b, author = {Hammerla, Leon and Lücking, Andy and Reinert, Carolin and Mehler, Alexander}, title = {D-Neg: Syntax-Aware Graph Reasoning for Negation Detection}, booktitle = {Proceedings of 2025 International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing & Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (IJCNLP-AACL-Findings)}, year = {2025}, note = {accepted}, keywords = {neglab} } -
New EMNLP 2025 publication accepted
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The publication MedLinkDE — MedDRA Entity Linking for German with Guided Chain of Thought Reasoning was accepted at the EMNLP 2025.
November, 2025. MedLinkDE – MedDRA Entity Linking for German with Guided Chain of Thought Reasoning. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 31569–31581.BibTeX@inproceedings{Christof:et:al:2025, author = {Christof, Roman and Zeidi, Farnaz and Messelhäußer, Manuela and Mentzer, Dirk and Koenig, Renate and Childs, Liam and Mehler, Alexander}, title = {{M}ed{L}ink{DE} {--} {M}ed{DRA} Entity Linking for {G}erman with Guided Chain of Thought Reasoning}, editor = {Christodoulopoulos, Christos and Chakraborty, Tanmoy and Rose, Carolyn and Peng, Violet}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing}, month = {nov}, year = {2025}, address = {Suzhou, China}, publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics}, url = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1609/}, doi = {10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1609}, pages = {31569--31581}, isbn = {979-8-89176-332-6}, pdf = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1609.pdf}, abstract = {In pharmacovigilance, effective automation of medical data structuring, especially linking entities to standardized terminologies such as MedDRA, is critical. This challenge is rarely addressed for German data. With MedLinkDE we address German MedDRA entity linking for adverse drug reactions in a two-step approach: (1) retrieval of medical terms with fine-tuned embedding models, followed (2) by guided chain-of-thought re-ranking using LLMs. To this end, we introduce RENOde, a German real-world MedDRA dataset consisting of reportings from patients and healthcare professionals. To overcome the challenges posed by the linguistic diversity of these reports, we generate synthetic data mapping the two reporting styles of patients and healthcare professionals. Our embedding models, fine-tuned on these synthetic, quasi-personalized datasets, show competitive performance with real datasets in terms of accuracy at high top- recall, providing a robust basis for re-ranking. Our subsequent guided Chain of Thought (CoT) re-ranking, informed by MedDRA coding guidelines, improves entity linking accuracy by approximately 15{\%} (Acc@1) compared to embedding-only strategies. In this way, our approach demonstrates the feasibility of entity linking in medical reports under the constraints of data scarcity by relying on synthetic data reflecting different informant roles of reporting persons.} } -
Invited Talk
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Andy Lücking has been invited to give a talk at the joint MMSR/ISA workshop as part of the international conference on Computational Semantics.
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