Publication

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 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

Bhuvanesh Verma, Mounika Marreddy and Alexander Mehler. 2026. Predicting Convincingness in Political Speech: How Emotional Tone Shapes Persuasive Strength. Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis. accepted.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Verma:et:al:2026,
  title     = {Predicting Convincingness in Political Speech: How Emotional Tone
               Shapes Persuasive Strength},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Computational Approaches to
               Subjectivity, Sentiment, \& Social Media Analysis},
  year      = {2026},
  author    = {Verma, Bhuvanesh and Marreddy, Mounika and Mehler, Alexander},
  keywords  = {Argument Detection, Argument Quality Assessment,Topic Modelling, Persuasiveness, Convincingness, Emotion Analysis, Argument Mining, satek},
  abstract  = {Emotional tone plays a central role in persuasion, yet its impact
               on computational assessments of political argument quality in
               real world election campaign speeches remains understudied. In
               this work, we investigate whether positive emotional framing correlates
               with higher perceived convincingness in political arguments. We
               fine-tune language models on argument quality datasets and test
               their ability to transfer convincingness predictions to real-world
               campaign speeches. Using a corpus of U.S. presidential campaign
               speeches, we analyze emotional polarity in relation to predicted
               persuasive strength to test whether positively framed arguments
               are judged more convincing than neutral or negative ones. Our
               empirical analysis shows that political parties rely heavily on
               argumentation during their election campaigns. Also, we found
               the evidence that politicians strategically employ emotional cues
               within their arguments during these campaign speeches, with positive
               emotions being more strongly associated with persuasive strength,
               for example in topics such as USMCA’s Effect on American Jobs
               and Agriculture, Border Control Policies, Progressive Tax Reforms.
               At the same time, we find that negative emotions have a weaker
               yet still non-negligible influence on voter persuasion in topics
               such as City Crime and Civil Unrest and White Supremacist Violence
               (Charlottesville Incident).},
  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.}
}