General

New publication accepted at IEEE ICNLP 2026

We are pleased to inform you about the acceptance of a new paper at IEEE’s 2026 8th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICNLP) entitled:

Learning to Detect Cross-Modal Negation: An Analysis of Latent Representations and an Attention-Based Solution

Ali Abusaleh, Leon Hammerla and Alexander Mehler. 2026. Learning to Detect Cross-Modal Negation: An Analysis of Latent Representations and an Attention-Based Solution. 2026 8th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICNLP). accepted.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Abusaleh:et:al:2026,
  title     = {Learning to Detect Cross-Modal Negation: An Analysis of Latent
               Representations and an Attention-Based Solution},
  author    = {Abusaleh, Ali and Hammerla, Leon and Mehler, Alexander},
  booktitle = {2026 8th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICNLP)},
  eventdate = {2026-03-20/2026-03-22},
  location  = {Xi'an,China},
  year      = {2026},
  keywords  = {Vision language model, Natural language processing, Cross-modal retrieval, negation detection, video analysis, Multimodal analysis, Political Communication, neglab, new-data-spaces, circlet},
  abstract  = {Detecting high-level semantic concepts like negation across modalities
               remains a challenge for current multimodal systems. We analyze
               this as a fundamental representation learning problem, providing
               the first evidence that negation does not form a linearly or non-linearly
               separable class in the latent spaces of standard vision-language
               models (VLMs). We demonstrate that pretrained embeddings primarily
               encode modality-specific features, lacking a generalizable negation
               signal. To overcome this, we propose a novel cross-modal attention
               architecture that explicitly models inter-modal dependencies,
               achieving performance gains of up to +7.03% F1 over unimodal baselines.
               Our analysis reveals a key asymmetry: while textual negation often
               appears independently, visual negation is semantically dependent
               on linguistic context, a finding validated through our statistical
               analysis of 3,222 political video-text pairs automatically annotated
               via Qwen2.5-VL. By combining this analysis with self-supervised
               video representations (JEPA2), we advance the modeling of temporal
               negation. This work provides new methods and insights for learning
               robust, semantically-aligned representations in multimodal systems.},
  note      = {accepted}
}

New article published at SoftwareX

The following article is published in the journal SoftwareX:

DUUIgateway: A Web Service for Platform-independent, Ubiquitous Big Data NLP

Cedric Borkowski, Giuseppe Abrami, Dawit Terefe, Daniel Baumartz and Alexander Mehler. 2026. DUUIgateway: A Web Service for Platform-independent, Ubiquitous Big Data NLP. SoftwareX, 34:102549.
BibTeX
@article{Borkowski:et:al:2026,
  title     = {{DUUIgateway}: A Web Service for Platform-independent, Ubiquitous Big Data NLP},
  journal   = {SoftwareX},
  volume    = {34},
  pages     = {102549},
  year      = {2026},
  issn      = {2352-7110},
  doi       = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2026.102549},
  url       = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352711026000439},
  author    = {Borkowski, Cedric and Abrami, Giuseppe and Terefe, Dawit and Baumartz, Daniel
               and Mehler, Alexander},
  keywords  = {duui, neglab, core, core_b05, core_c08, new-data-spaces, circlet},
  abstract  = {Distributed processing of unstructured text data is a challenge
               in the rapidly changing and evolving natural language processing
               (NLP) landscape. This landscape is characterized by heterogeneous
               systems, models, and formats, and especially by the increasing
               influence of AI systems. While many of these systems handle text
               data, there are also unified systems that process multiple input
               and output formats, while allowing for distributed corpus processing.
               However, there are hardly any user-friendly interfaces that allow
               existing NLP frameworks to be used flexibly and extended in a
               user-controlled manner. Due to this gap and the increasing importance
               of NLP for various scientific disciplines, there has been a demand
               for a web and API based flexible software solution for deploying,
               managing and monitoring NLP systems. Such a solution is provided
               by Docker Unified UIMA-gateway. We introduce DUUIgateway and evaluate
               its API and user-driven approach to encapsulation. We also describe
               how these features improve the usability and accessibility of
               the NLP framework DUUI. We illustrate DUUIgateway in the field
               of process modeling in higher education and show how it closes
               the latter gap in NLP by making a variety of systems for processing
               text and multimodal data accessible to non-experts.}
}

Invited talk at DaFWEBKON26

Andy Lücking and Alexander Mehler have been invited to give a talk at the Web Conference for German Teachers 2026. The topic of the speech is: “Language-accompanying gestures, AI and virtual reality – multimodal communication research at the intersection of linguistics and computer science”.

Andy Lücking and Alexander Mehler. 2026–01–28/2026–01–30. Sprachbegleitende Gesten, KI und Virtuelle Realität. Invited talk.
BibTeX
@misc{Luecking:Mehler:2026,
  author    = {Lücking, Andy and Mehler, Alexander},
  title     = {{Sprachbegleitende Gesten, KI und Virtuelle Realität}},
  subtitle  = {{Multimodale Kommunikationsforschung im Schnittfeld von Linguistik und Computerwissenschaft}},
  howpublished = {Invited talk at DaFWEBKON26, Webkonferenz für
                  Deutschlehrende},
  date      = {2026-01-28/2026-01-30},
  url       = {https://dafwebkon.com/events/sprachbegleitende-gesten/},
  keywords  = {talk, cosgrin-vr},
  note      = {Invited talk},
  abstract  = {Alltagskommunikation ist üblicherweise multimodal (d.h., nutzt
               mehr als einen Informationskanal). Gesprochene Sprache wird beispielsweise
               von manuellen Gesten begleitet. Diese Gesten wiederum können über
               die linguistische Bedeutung hinausgehende Information beitragen.
               Sie sind also semantisch interessant.<br><br>Der Vortrag skizziert
               eine räumliche Gestensemantik und führt in KI-gestützte Gestenklassifikation
               ein. Um multimodale Verhaltensdaten zu erfassen und auszuwerten,
               werden zunehmend Methoden der Virtuellen Realität (VR) eingesetzt.
               Das Frankfurter Va.Si.Li-Lab kombiniert KI und VR für Multimodalitätsforschung.
               Auf diese Weise lassen sich z.B. mutlimodal, avatarbasierte VR-Interaktionen
               untersuchen und mit Face-to-face-Interaktionen vergleichen. Der
               Vortrag stellt erste Ergebnisse vor.}
}

New publication in the proceedings of SuB 30:

The following paper has been accepted for publication in the proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, Special Session: Philosophical and Linguistic Approaches to Negation (PhilLingNeg).

Andy Lücking, Leon Hammerla and Alexander Mehler. 2026. Not every quantifier can be negated. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, Special Session “Philosophical and Linguistic Approaches to Negation (PhilLingNeg)”. accepted.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Luecking:Hammerla:Mehler:2026,
  author    = {Lücking, Andy and Hammerla, Leon and Mehler, Alexander},
  title     = {Not every quantifier can be negated},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of \textit{Sinn und Bedeutung}, Special Session ``Philosophical
               and Linguistic Approaches to Negation (PhilLingNeg)''},
  series    = {SuB'30},
  location  = {Frankfurt am Main},
  year      = {2026},
  pubstate  = {forthcoming},
  keywords  = {neglab},
  note      = {accepted}
}