INF

Research project within the CRC 1629 NegLaB (https://www.neglab.de/projects/inf/).

INF supports the CRC projects through all research stages, including the planning of empirical work, its statistical analysis, and the management, curation and archiving of data under CC-0 or CC-BY licenses to ensure reproducibility and long-term sustainability. To achieve this, INF

  1. optimizes the research workflow by formulating a structured data management plan;
  2. provides statistical training through workshops and individual consultations;
  3. assists in the maintenance of data repositories for short- and long-term storage;
  4. develops novel computational tools and annotation schemes, including virtual reality-based stimulus design and multimodal tracking methods.

Team

Publications and other activities

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}
}
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.}
}
Andy Lücking, Leon Hammerla and Alexander Mehler. 2026. Not every quantifier can be negated. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, Special Session “Philosophical and Linguistic Approaches to Negation (PhilLingNeg)”. accepted.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Luecking:Hammerla:Mehler:2026,
  author    = {Lücking, Andy and Hammerla, Leon and Mehler, Alexander},
  title     = {Not every quantifier can be negated},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of \textit{Sinn und Bedeutung}, Special Session ``Philosophical
               and Linguistic Approaches to Negation (PhilLingNeg)''},
  series    = {SuB'30},
  location  = {Frankfurt am Main},
  year      = {2026},
  pubstate  = {forthcoming},
  keywords  = {neglab},
  note      = {accepted}
}
Leon Hammerla, Andy Lücking, Carolin Reinert and Alexander Mehler. December, 2025. D-Neg: Syntax-Aware Graph Reasoning for Negation Detection. Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 1432–1454.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Hammerla:et:al:2025b,
  author    = {Hammerla, Leon and Lücking, Andy and Reinert, Carolin and Mehler, Alexander},
  title     = {{D}-Neg: Syntax-Aware Graph Reasoning for Negation Detection},
  editor    = {Inui, Kentaro and Sakti, Sakriani and Wang, Haofen and Wong, Derek F.
               and Bhattacharyya, Pushpak and Banerjee, Biplab and Ekbal, Asif and Chakraborty, Tanmoy
               and Singh, Dhirendra Pratap},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural
               Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific
               Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  month     = {dec},
  year      = {2025},
  address   = {Mumbai, India},
  publisher = {The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics},
  url       = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-ijcnlp.89/},
  pages     = {1432--1454},
  isbn      = {979-8-89176-303-6},
  abstract  = {Despite the communicative importance of negation, its detection
               remains challenging. Previous approaches perform poorly in out-of-domain
               scenarios, and progress outside of English has been slow due to
               a lack of resources and robust models. To address this gap, we
               present D-Neg: a syntax-aware graph reasoning model based on a
               transformer that incorporates syntactic embeddings by attention-gating.
               D-Neg uses graph attention to represent syntactic structures,
               emulating the effectiveness of rule-based dependency approaches
               for negation detection. We train D-Neg using 7 English resources
               and their translations into 10 languages, all aligned at the annotation
               level. We conduct an evaluation of all these datasets in in-domain
               and out-of-domain settings. Our work represents a significant
               advance in negation detection, enabling more effective cross-lingual
               research.},
  keywords  = {neglab}
}
Leon Hammerla, Alexander Mehler and Giuseppe Abrami. December, 2025. Standardizing Heterogeneous Corpora with DUUR: A Dual Data- and Process-Oriented Approach to Enhancing NLP Pipeline Integration. Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 1410–1425.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Hammerla:et:al:2025a,
  author    = {Hammerla, Leon and Mehler, Alexander and Abrami, Giuseppe},
  title     = {Standardizing Heterogeneous Corpora with {DUUR}: A Dual Data-
               and Process-Oriented Approach to Enhancing NLP Pipeline Integration},
  editor    = {Inui, Kentaro and Sakti, Sakriani and Wang, Haofen and Wong, Derek F.
               and Bhattacharyya, Pushpak and Banerjee, Biplab and Ekbal, Asif and Chakraborty, Tanmoy
               and Singh, Dhirendra Pratap},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural
               Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific
               Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  month     = {dec},
  year      = {2025},
  address   = {Mumbai, India},
  publisher = {The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics},
  url       = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-ijcnlp.87/},
  pages     = {1410--1425},
  isbn      = {979-8-89176-303-6},
  abstract  = {Despite their success, LLMs are too computationally expensive
               to replace task- or domain-specific NLP systems. However, the
               variety of corpus formats makes reusing these systems difficult.
               This underscores the importance of maintaining an interoperable
               NLP landscape. We address this challenge by pursuing two objectives:
               standardizing corpus formats and enabling massively parallel corpus
               processing. We present a unified conversion framework embedded
               in a massively parallel, microservice-based, programming language-independent
               NLP architecture designed for modularity and extensibility. It
               allows for the integration of external NLP conversion tools and
               supports the addition of new components that meet basic compatibility
               requirements. To evaluate our dual data- and process-oriented
               approach to standardization, we (1) benchmark its efficiency in
               terms of processing speed and memory usage, (2) demonstrate the
               benefits of standardized corpus formats for NLP downstream tasks,
               and (3) illustrate the advantages of incorporating custom formats
               into a corpus format ecosystem.},
  keywords  = {neglab,duui}
}
Daniel Bundan, Giuseppe Abrami and Alexander Mehler. 2025. Multimodal Docker Unified UIMA Interface: New Horizons for Distributed Microservice-Oriented Processing of Corpora using UIMA. Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2025): Long and Short Papers, 257–268.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Bundan:Abrami:Mehler:2025,
  author    = {Bundan, Daniel and Abrami, Giuseppe and Mehler, Alexander},
  title     = {Multimodal Docker Unified {UIMA} Interface: New Horizons for Distributed
               Microservice-Oriented Processing of Corpora using {UIMA}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Natural Language Processing
               (KONVENS 2025): Long and Short Papers},
  year      = {2025},
  editor    = {Wartena, Christian and Heid, Ulrich},
  location  = {Hildesheim, Germany},
  address   = {Hannover, Germany},
  publisher = {HsH Applied Academics},
  pages     = {257--268},
  series    = {KONVENS '25},
  url       = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.konvens-1.22/},
  pdf       = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.konvens-1.22.pdf},
  poster    = {https://www.texttechnologylab.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Poster_Multimodal_DUUI_KONVENS_2025.pdf},
  keywords  = {duui,neglab,new-data-spaces,circlet}
}
Andy Lücking and Jonathan Ginzburg. 2025. Exceptions From Rules and Noteworthy Exceptions. Linguistics and Philosophy, 48:371–409.
BibTeX
@article{Luecking:Ginzburg:2025-exceptions,
  author    = {Lücking, Andy and Ginzburg, Jonathan},
  title     = {Exceptions From Rules and Noteworthy Exceptions},
  subtitle  = {The Balance Scale for Making Exceptions},
  journal   = {Linguistics and Philosophy},
  year      = {2025},
  volume    = {48},
  pages     = {371-409},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-024-09429-1},
  doi       = {10.1007/s10988-024-09429-1},
  keywords  = {gemdis,neglab}
}
Giuseppe Abrami, Markos Genios, Filip Fitzermann, Daniel Baumartz and Alexander Mehler. 2025. Docker Unified UIMA Interface: New perspectives for NLP on big data. SoftwareX, 29:102033.
BibTeX
@article{Abrami:et:al:2025:a,
  title     = {Docker Unified UIMA Interface: New perspectives for NLP on big data},
  journal   = {SoftwareX},
  volume    = {29},
  pages     = {102033},
  year      = {2025},
  issn      = {2352-7110},
  doi       = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2024.102033},
  url       = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352711024004047},
  author    = {Giuseppe Abrami and Markos Genios and Filip Fitzermann and Daniel Baumartz
               and Alexander Mehler},
  keywords  = {Docker, Kubernetes, UIMA, Distributed NLP, duui, biofid, neglab, new-data-spaces, circlet, core, core_c08},
  abstract  = {Processing large amounts of natural language text using machine
               learning-based models is becoming important in many disciplines.
               This demand is being met by a variety of approaches, resulting
               in the heterogeneous deployment of separate, partly incompatible,
               not natively scalable applications. To overcome the technological
               bottleneck involved, we have developed Docker Unified UIMA Interface,
               a system for the standardized, parallel, platform-independent,
               distributed and microservices-based solution for processing large
               and extensive text corpora with any NLP method. We present DUUI
               as a framework that enables automated orchestration of GPU-based
               NLP processes beyond the existing Docker Swarm cluster variant,
               and in addition to the adaptation to new runtime environments
               such as Kubernetes. Therefore, a new driver for DUUI is introduced,
               which enables the lightweight orchestration of DUUI processes
               within a Kubernetes environment in a scalable setup. In this way,
               the paper opens up novel text-technological perspectives for existing
               practices in disciplines that deal with the scientific analysis
               of large amounts of data based on NLP.}
}