General

Best Demo Award at NAACL 2025

We are delighted that 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 awarded the Best Demo Paper at this year’s annual conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2025).

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. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (System Demonstrations), 522–534. Best Demo Award.
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    = {B{\"o}nisch, Kevin and Abrami, Giuseppe and Mehler, Alexander},
  editor    = {Dziri, Nouha and Ren, Sean (Xiang) and Diao, Shizhe},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas
               Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human
               Language Technologies (System Demonstrations)},
  year      = {2025},
  address   = {Albuquerque, New Mexico},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  url       = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-demo.42/},
  pages     = {522--534},
  isbn      = {979-8-89176-191-9},
  abstract  = {The annotation and exploration of large text corpora, both automatic
               and manual, presents significant challenges across multiple disciplines,
               including linguistics, digital humanities, biology, and legal
               science. These challenges are exacerbated by the heterogeneity
               of processing methods, which complicates corpus visualization,
               interaction, and integration. To address these issues, we introduce
               the Unified Corpus Explorer (UCE), a standardized, dockerized,
               open-source and dynamic Natural Language Processing (NLP) application
               designed for flexible and scalable corpus navigation. Herein,
               UCE utilizes the UIMA format for NLP annotations as a standardized
               input, constructing interfaces and features around those annotations
               while dynamically adapting to the corpora and their extracted
               annotations. We evaluate UCE based on a user study and demonstrate
               its versatility as a corpus explorer based on generative AI.},
  note      = {Best Demo Award},
  pdf       = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-demo.42.pdf},
  keywords  = {uce,new-data-spaces,circlet,core,core_c08}
}

New publication accepted at NAACL 2025

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. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (System Demonstrations), 522–534. Best Demo Award.
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    = {B{\"o}nisch, Kevin and Abrami, Giuseppe and Mehler, Alexander},
  editor    = {Dziri, Nouha and Ren, Sean (Xiang) and Diao, Shizhe},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas
               Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human
               Language Technologies (System Demonstrations)},
  year      = {2025},
  address   = {Albuquerque, New Mexico},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  url       = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-demo.42/},
  pages     = {522--534},
  isbn      = {979-8-89176-191-9},
  abstract  = {The annotation and exploration of large text corpora, both automatic
               and manual, presents significant challenges across multiple disciplines,
               including linguistics, digital humanities, biology, and legal
               science. These challenges are exacerbated by the heterogeneity
               of processing methods, which complicates corpus visualization,
               interaction, and integration. To address these issues, we introduce
               the Unified Corpus Explorer (UCE), a standardized, dockerized,
               open-source and dynamic Natural Language Processing (NLP) application
               designed for flexible and scalable corpus navigation. Herein,
               UCE utilizes the UIMA format for NLP annotations as a standardized
               input, constructing interfaces and features around those annotations
               while dynamically adapting to the corpora and their extracted
               annotations. We evaluate UCE based on a user study and demonstrate
               its versatility as a corpus explorer based on generative AI.},
  note      = {Best Demo Award},
  pdf       = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-demo.42.pdf},
  keywords  = {uce,new-data-spaces,circlet,core,core_c08}
}

Nomination for the Goethe-University Innovation Prize

The Bundestags-Mine has been nominated for the Innovation Prize of the Goethe-University!

A final pitch will take place on December 10th, 2024 at 6 PM in the Festsaal Casino at Campus Westend. All the finalists will compete for the final ranking and the corresponding prize money, which is sponsored by the Sparkasse Foundation. If you’d like to join, tickets are freely avaiable on eventbrite.

The project idea was initiated through a lecture held by Prof. Dr. Alexander Mehler and Giuseppe Abrami. After the course ended, it was continued privately by one of the students, Kevin Bönisch, while maintaining contact with the Text Technology Lab. In 2023, the project was published in the Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications series, again through the Text Technology Lab in conjuction with Sabine Wehnert from the Georg-Eckert-Institut.

The Bundestags-Mine leverages artificial intelligence to analyze various data formats from the German Bundestag, including plenary proceedings, polls, agenda items, and more. The processed data is curated within the platform and made available for download. All data is freely accessible and can be obtained directly from the Bundestags-Mine website. This approach enables personalized access to the vast amounts of data produced daily by the German Bundestag, making politics more accessible. Additionally, it utilizes state-of-the-art AI techniques for advanced analysis, including sentiment analysis, topic modeling, summarization, and more, provided by the tools that were developed within the Text Technology Lab.

The Text Technology Lab actively encourages students to go beyond expectations, supporting them in publishing their first scientific papers, bachelor’s or master’s theses, and, as demonstrated in this example, achieving distinguished awards. The lab also provides guidance and infrastructure for large-scale research projects when necessary.

So if you are interested in research projects, bachelor’s or master’s theses that align with our research, or have other inquiries, feel free to contact us.