Publication

New publications at KONVENS 2026

We are pleased to inform you that the following papers have been accepted for presentation at KONVENS 2026, which will take place from September 14–17, 2026:

Mevlüt Bagci, Ali Abusaleh, Daniel Baumartz, Alexander Mehler, Giuseppe Abrami and Maxim Konca. 2026. Extending a Parliamentary Corpus with MPs’ Tweets: Automatic Annotation and Evaluation Using TTLABTWEETCORPUS. KONVENS 2026 - Context matters: NLP beyond Text. accepted.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{bagci:et:al:2026,
  title     = {Extending a Parliamentary Corpus with {MP}s{\textquoteright} Tweets:
               Automatic Annotation and Evaluation Using {TTLABTWEETCORPUS}},
  author    = {Mevlüt Bagci and Ali Abusaleh and Daniel Baumartz and Alexander Mehler
               and Giuseppe Abrami and Maxim Konca},
  booktitle = {KONVENS 2026 - Context matters: NLP beyond Text},
  year      = {2026},
  address   = {Hamburg (Germany)},
  keywords  = {Corpora, Tweets, Political Data, Text, Media classification},
  note      = {accepted}
}

Christoph Wigbels, Ali Abusaleh, Markus T. Jansen, Alexander Mehler, Manuel Schaaf and Markus J. Hofmann. 2026. Individual Text Corpora Predict User-Specific Knowledge: Benchmarks of Individualized Knowledge Simulation. KONVENS 2026 - Context matters: NLP beyond Text. accepted.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Wigbels:et:al:2026:a,
  author    = {{Wigbels, Christoph and Abusaleh, Ali} and Jansen, Markus T. and Mehler, Alexander
               and Schaaf, Manuel and Hofmann, Markus J.},
  title     = {Individual Text Corpora Predict User-Specific Knowledge: Benchmarks
               of Individualized Knowledge Simulation},
  booktitle = {KONVENS 2026 - Context matters: NLP beyond Text},
  year      = {2026},
  address   = {Hamburg (Germany)},
  keywords  = {Individual Text Corpora, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Personalized Language Models, Probabilistic Calibration, Knowledge Benchmarks, Data Contamination, German NLP, spp, circlet},
  note      = {accepted}
}

Leon Hammerla, Bhuvanesh Verma and Alexander Mehler. 2026. RT-Seg: A Toolkit for Reasoning Trace Segmentation. KONVENS 2026 - Context matters: NLP beyond Text. accepted.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Hammerla:etal:2026:c,
  title     = {RT-Seg: A Toolkit for Reasoning Trace Segmentation},
  author    = {Leon Hammerla and Bhuvanesh Verma and Alexander Mehler},
  booktitle = {KONVENS 2026 - Context matters: NLP beyond Text},
  year      = {2026},
  address   = {Hamburg (Germany)},
  keywords  = {neglab},
  note      = {accepted}
}

New publications related to CORE C08

We are pleased to announce that the following articles have been accepted or have already been published:

Sebastian Gombert, Sonja Hahn, Nico Andersen, Leon Camus, Zhifan Sun, Ngoc Nhu Hao Nguyen, Fabian Zehner, Longwei Cong, Alexander Mehler and Hendrik Drachsler. July, 2026. Rubrics as Semantic Subspaces: A Unified Approach to Rubric-based Constructed Response Scoring across Short Answers and Essays. Proceedings of the 21st Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2026), 624–634.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Gombert:et:al:2026:a,
  title     = {Rubrics as Semantic Subspaces: A Unified Approach to Rubric-based
               Constructed Response Scoring across Short Answers and Essays},
  author    = {Gombert, Sebastian and Hahn, Sonja and Andersen, Nico and Camus, Leon
               and Sun, Zhifan and Nguyen, Ngoc Nhu Hao and Zehner, Fabian and Cong, Longwei
               and Mehler, Alexander and Drachsler, Hendrik},
  editor    = {Kochmar, Ekaterina and Alhafni, Bashar and Bann{\`o}, Stefano
               and Bexte, Marie and Burstein, Jill and Horbach, Andrea and Laarmann-Quante, Ronja
               and Tack, Anais and Yaneva, Victoria and Yuan, Zheng},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 21st Workshop on Innovative Use of {NLP} for
               Building Educational Applications ({BEA} 2026)},
  month     = {jul},
  keywords  = {core, core_c08},
  year      = {2026},
  address   = {San Diego, California, USA},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  url       = {https://aclanthology.org/2026.bea-1.44/},
  doi       = {10.18653/v1/2026.bea-1.44},
  pages     = {624--634},
  isbn      = {979-8-89176-409-5},
  pdf       = {https://aclanthology.org/2026.bea-1.44.pdf},
  abstract  = {Rubrics are the primary reference for manual scoring of constructed
               responses, and there is growing interest in their use in automated
               scoring methodologies. In this work, we propose Aspect-Grounded
               Rubric{--}Answer Alignment (AGRAA), a rubric-based end-to-end
               scoring framework that models rubric descriptors as latent aspect
               spaces. Concretely, rubric descriptors are represented as low-dimensional
               subspaces derived from contextualised transformer embeddings,
               and student responses are scored according to how strongly their
               representations align with these rubric-induced spaces relative
               to the residual space outside them. This formulation provides
               a geometrically grounded interpretation of rubric-based scoring
               while enabling end-to-end training with standard transformer encoders.
               We introduce three distinct architectural variants and evaluate
               them on multiple short-answer and essay scoring datasets. Across
               these tasks, AGRAA achieves predictive performance highly competitive
               with strong neural and feature-based baselines. In addition, the
               framework yields interpretable intermediate representations that
               expose which rubric-defined aspects contribute to scoring decisions,
               enabling decision-aligned explanations grounded in rubric descriptors.}
}

Sebastian Gombert, Gianluca Romano, Leon Camus, Daniel Baumartz, Fabiola Gonçalves Ribeiro, Alexander Mehler and Hendrik Drachsler. 2026. NeoBridge: A Scalable Platform for Assessment Orchestration and Log Data Collection in Online Reasoning Assessments. Proceedings of the Twenty-first European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning. accepted.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Gombert:et:al:2026:b,
  author    = {Gombert, Sebastian and Romano, Gianluca and Camus, Leon and Baumartz, Daniel
               and Gon{\c{c}}alves Ribeiro, Fabiola and Mehler, Alexander and Drachsler, Hendrik},
  title     = {{NeoBridge}: A Scalable Platform for Assessment Orchestration
               and Log Data Collection in Online Reasoning Assessments},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twenty-first European Conference on Technology
               Enhanced Learning},
  series    = {ECTEL 2026},
  address   = {Valencia, Spain},
  year      = {2026},
  keywords  = {core, core_c08},
  eventdate = {2026-09-14/2026-09-18},
  note      = {accepted}
}

New Publication at NALOMA 2026

We are pleased to inform you that the following paper has been accepted at the 6th NALOMA (NAtural Language Meets LOgic and MAchine Learning) workshop, co-located with ESSLLI from August 3–7 in Prague.

Leon Hammerla and Alexander Mehler. 2026. Negation in Reasoning Traces: Interpretable Signals of Correctness and Provenance. Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning (NALOMA). accepted.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Hammerla:Mehler:2026:b,
  title     = {Negation in Reasoning Traces: Interpretable Signals of Correctness
               and Provenance},
  author    = {Leon Hammerla and Alexander Mehler},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning (NALOMA)},
  year      = {2026},
  address   = {Prague (Czech Republic)},
  keywords  = {neglab},
  note      = {accepted}
}

New publications at XR Salento 2026

We are pleased to inform you about the acceptance of the following paper at XR Salento 2026 which will be published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) by Springer:

Patrick Schrottenbacher, Alexander Mehler, Vivienne Bernhardt, Leon Rohe and Giuseppe Abrami. 2026. ReEmote: Towards Emotion Representation in VR Through Va.Si.Li-Lab. Proceedings of XR Salento 2026. accepted.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Schrottenbacher:et:al:2026:a,
  author    = {Schrottenbacher, Patrick and Mehler, Alexander and Bernhardt, Vivienne
               and Rohe, Leon and Abrami, Giuseppe},
  title     = {ReEmote: Towards Emotion Representation in {VR} Through {Va.Si.Li}-Lab},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of XR Salento 2026},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Springer International Publishing},
  keywords  = {VR, XR, affective computing, virtual humans, emotion detection, FACES},
  abstract  = {Human social interactions are inherently multimodal, shaped not
               only by what speakers convey but also by cues such as facial expressions,
               posture, and gestures. Together, these channels shape both participants'
               perceptions and behaviors, further reinforcing conversational
               feedback loops. This multimodal system extends to VR, where avatars
               serve as proxies for human interaction, making both visual and
               auditory fidelity essential for engaging. To properly utilize
               the emotional expression space that virtual environments allow,
               we introduce ReEmote. ReEmote extends the capabilities of Va.Si.Li-Lab,
               a collaborative, multi-user VR platform built on Ubiq. While Va.Si.Li-Lab
               supports user emotional expression through facial and hand tracking,
               ReEmote extends this by introducing schema-based emotion mappings
               that affect both avatars and their environments. This fosters
               immersive, emotionally aware environments that are beneficial
               for human and chatbot agent interactions, where human users and
               virtual agents share an emotional expression space. By enabling
               richer emotional dynamics, ReEmote opens up new ways of designing
               affective and engaging virtual experiences.In this paper, we describe
               the design choices behind ReEmote and present an evaluation of
               the graphical validity of the emotion representation introduced
               by ReEmote. Our results indicate that emotions can be validly
               represented through avatar facial expressions that users can quickly
               identify as Ekman's basic emotions.This opens up several possibilities
               for extending emotion-related text-to-speech (TTS) applications
               in Extended Reality (XR) with ReEmote. The paper also outlines
               use cases for XR-based TTS applications.},
  note      = {accepted}
}