News

New publication accepted at DHd 2025

The following publication was accepted at the DHd 2025 in Bielefeld, Germany (03. – 07.03.2025).

DUUI: A Toolbox for the Construction of a new Kind of Natural Language Processing

Giuseppe Abrami, Daniel Baumartz and Alexander Mehler. 2025. DUUI: A Toolbox for the Construction of a new Kind of Natural Language Processing. Proceedings of the DHd 2025: Under Construction. Geisteswissenschaften und Data Humanities, 446–448.
BibTeX 
@inproceedings{Abrami:et:al:2025:b,
  author    = {Abrami, Giuseppe and Baumartz, Daniel and Mehler, Alexander},
  title     = {DUUI: A Toolbox for the Construction of a new Kind of Natural
               Language Processing},
  year      = {2025},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the DHd 2025: Under Construction. Geisteswissenschaften
               und Data Humanities},
  numpages  = {3},
  location  = {Bielefeld, Germany},
  series    = {DHd 2025},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  keywords  = {duui},
  pages     = {446--448},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.14943128},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14943128},
  poster    = {https://zenodo.org/records/14944575}
}

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.

New publications published in the special issue New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia

The following publications have been published in the special issue New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia:

Viki LibraRy: Collaborative Hypertext Browsing and Navigation in Virtual Reality

Kevin Bönisch, Alexander Mehler, Shaduan Babbili, Yannick Heinrich, Philipp Stephan and Giuseppe Abrami. 2024. Viki LibraRy: Collaborative Hypertext Browsing and Navigation in Virtual Reality. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 0(0):1–31.
BibTeX 
@article{Boenisch:et:al:2024:b,
  author    = {B\"{o}nisch, Kevin and Mehler, Alexander and Babbili, Shaduan
               and Heinrich, Yannick and Stephan, Philipp and Abrami, Giuseppe},
  abstract  = {We present Viki LibraRy, a dynamically built library in virtual
               reality (VR) designed to visualize hypertext systems, with an
               emphasis on collaborative interaction and spatial immersion. Viki
               LibraRy goes beyond traditional methods of text distribution by
               providing a platform where users can share, process, and engage
               with textual information. It operates at the interface of VR,
               collaborative learning and spatial data processing to make reading
               tangible and memorable in a spatially mediated way. The article
               describes the building blocks of Viki LibraRy, its underlying
               architecture, and several use cases. It evaluates Viki LibraRy
               in comparison to a conventional web interface for text retrieval
               and reading. The article shows that Viki LibraRy provides users
               with spatial references for structuring their recall, so that
               they can better remember consulted texts and their meta-information
               (e.g. in terms of subject areas and content categories)},
  title     = {{Viki LibraRy: Collaborative Hypertext Browsing and Navigation
               in Virtual Reality}},
  journal   = {New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia},
  volume    = {0},
  number    = {0},
  pages     = {1--31},
  year      = {2024},
  publisher = {Taylor \& Francis},
  doi       = {10.1080/13614568.2024.2383581},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.1080/13614568.2024.2383581},
  eprint    = {https://doi.org/10.1080/13614568.2024.2383581}
}

Geo-spatial Hypertext in Virtual Reality: Mapping and Navigating Global News Event Spaces

Patrick Schrottenbacher, Alexander Mehler, Theresa Berg, Jasper Hustedt, Julian Gagel, Timo Lüttig and Giuseppe Abrami. 2024. Geo-spatial hypertext in virtual reality: mapping and navigating global news event spaces. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 0(0):1–30.
BibTeX 
@article{Schrottenbacher:et:al:2024,
  author    = {Schrottenbacher, Patrick and Mehler, Alexander and Berg, Theresa
               and Hustedt, Jasper and Gagel, Julian and Lüttig, Timo and Abrami, Giuseppe},
  title     = {Geo-spatial hypertext in virtual reality: mapping and navigating
               global news event spaces},
  journal   = {New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia},
  volume    = {0},
  number    = {0},
  pages     = {1--30},
  year      = {2024},
  publisher = {Taylor \& Francis},
  doi       = {10.1080/13614568.2024.2383601},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.1080/13614568.2024.2383601},
  eprint    = {https://doi.org/10.1080/13614568.2024.2383601},
  abstract  = {Every day, a myriad of events take place that are documented and
               shared online through news articles from a variety of sources.
               As a result, as users navigate the Web, the volume of data can
               lead to information overload, making it difficult to find specific
               details about an event. We present News in Time and Space (NiTS)
               to address this issue: NiTS is a fully immersive system integrated
               into Va.Si.Li-Lab that organises textual information in a geospatial
               hypertext system in virtual reality. With NiTS, users can visualise,
               filter and interact with information currently based on GDELT
               on a virtual globe providing document networks to analyse global
               events and trends. The article describes NiTS, its event semantics
               and architecture. It evaluates NiTS in comparison to a classic
               search engine website, extended by NiTSs information filtering
               capabilities to make it comparable. Our comparison with this website
               technology, which is directly linked to the user's usage habits,
               shows that NiTS enables comparable information exploration even
               if the users have little or no experience with VR. That is, we
               observe an equivalent search result behaviour, but with the advantage
               that VR allows users to get their results with a higher level
               of usability without distracting them from their tasks. Through
               its integration with Va.Si.Li-Lab, a simulation-based learning
               environment, NiTS can be used in simulations of learning processes
               aimed at studying critical online reasoning, where Va.Si.Li-Lab
               guarantees that this can be done in relation to individual or
               groups of learners.}
}

Two new papers at SemDial 2024 — TrentoLogue

The Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, September 11th – 12th, 2024

On gesture semantics:

Andy Lücking, Alexander Mehler and Alexander Henlein. 2024. The Linguistic Interpretation of Non-emblematic Gestures Must be agreed in Dialogue: Combining Perceptual Classifiers and Grounding/Clarification Mechanisms. Proceedings of the 28th Workshop on The Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue.
BibTeX 
@inproceedings{Luecking:Mehler:Henlein:2024-classifier,
  title     = {The Linguistic Interpretation of Non-emblematic Gestures Must
               be agreed in Dialogue: Combining Perceptual Classifiers and Grounding/Clarification
               Mechanisms},
  author    = {Lücking, Andy and Mehler, Alexander and Henlein, Alexander},
  year      = {2024},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 28th Workshop on The Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue},
  series    = {SemDial'24 -- TrentoLogue},
  location  = {Università di Trento, Palazzo Piomarta, Rovereto},
  url       = {https://www.semdial.org/anthology/papers/Z/Z24/Z24-4031/},
  pdf       = {http://semdial.org/anthology/Z24-Lucking_semdial_0031.pdf}
}

On brain-based semantics:

Jonathan Ginzburg, Chris Eliasmith and Andy Lücking. 2024. Swann's name: Towards a Dialogical Brain Semantics. Proceedings of the 28th Workshop on The Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue.
BibTeX 
@inproceedings{Ginzburg:Eliasmith:Luecking:2024-swann,
  title     = {Swann's name: {Towards} a Dialogical Brain Semantics},
  author    = {Ginzburg, Jonathan and Eliasmith, Chris and Lücking, Andy},
  year      = {2024},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 28th Workshop on The Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue},
  series    = {SemDial'24 -- TrentoLogue},
  location  = {Università di Trento, Palazzo Piomarta, Rovereto},
  url       = {https://www.semdial.org/anthology/papers/Z/Z24/Z24-3007/},
  pdf       = {http://semdial.org/anthology/Z24-Ginzburg_semdial_0007.pdf}
}