news

New SemDial publication

TTLab publishes its VR-based human–human directions dialogue corpus mediated by avatars.

Andy Lücking, Felix Voll, Daniel Rott, Alexander Henlein and Alexander Mehler. 2025. Head and Hand Movements During Turn Transitions: Data-Based Multimodal Analysis Using the Frankfurt VR Gesture–Speech Alignment Corpus (FraGA). Proceedings of the 29th Workshop on The Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue – Full Papers, 146–156.
BibTeX 
@inproceedings{Luecking:Voll:Rott:Henlein:Mehler:2025-fraga,
  title     = {Head and Hand Movements During Turn Transitions: Data-Based Multimodal
               Analysis Using the {Frankfurt VR Gesture--Speech Alignment Corpus}
               ({FraGA})},
  author    = {Lücking, Andy and Voll, Felix and Rott, Daniel and Henlein, Alexander
               and Mehler, Alexander},
  year      = {2025},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 29th Workshop on The Semantics and Pragmatics
               of Dialogue -- Full Papers},
  series    = {SemDial'25 -- Bialogue},
  publisher = {SEMDIAL},
  url       = {http://semdial.org/anthology/Z25-Luecking_semdial_3316.pdf},
  pages     = {146--156},
  keywords  = {gemdis}
}

ESSLLI advanced course on iconic gesture semantics!

The ViCom project GemDiS offers the ESSLLI 2025 advanced course on the semantics of iconic gestures. This is how the AI Mistral advertises the course:
“Unravel the mysteries of non-verbal communication in our upcoming advanced course on Spatial Gesture Semantics at ESSLLI 2025! Dive into the fascinating world of manual gestures and their interaction with speech meaning. Discover how spatial semantics and AI technologies are revolutionizing our understanding of gestures. Don’t miss out on this cutting-edge exploration from July 28 to August 1!”

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.