News

New publication accepted at ITC 2026

The following paper has been accepted for publication in the proceedings of the International Test Commission Conference (ITC) 2026 in Auckland, New Zealand:

Linguistic Features as Predictors of Students’ Performance in Domain-Specific Critical Online Reasoning Tasks

Walter Bisang and Alexander Mehler. 2026. Linguistic Features as Predictors of Students' Performance in Domain-Specific Critical Online Reasoning Tasks. International Test Commission Conference (ITC) 2026. accepted.
BibTeX 
@inproceedings{Bisang:Mehler:2026,
  title     = {Linguistic Features as Predictors of Students' Performance in
               Domain-Specific Critical Online Reasoning Tasks},
  author    = {Bisang, Walter and Mehler, Alexander},
  booktitle = {International Test Commission Conference (ITC) 2026},
  eventdate = {2026-06-30/2026-07-03},
  location  = {Auckland, New Zealand},
  note      = {accepted},
  year      = {2026},
  keywords  = {core,core_b05}
}

New publication accepted at WASSA

The following paper has been accepted for publication in the proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis (WASSA):

Predicting Convincingness in Political Speech: How Emotional Tone Shapes Persuasive Strength

Failed to render single BibTeX entry by cite key

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No matching entry for cite key Verma:et:al:2026

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.}
}