Research Group Information Extraction and Interpretation (IEI)

The Information Extraction and Interpretation Group works on a number of tasks in algorithmic text understanding, all of which aim to detect and structure the information present in free text and to enable and support the interpretation of this data. The information that can be found in text can either be directly named, or can result from an interpretation; thus, inferences can also be made about the effect of a text on a:n reader:in or about characteristics of the author.

This includes a number of specific tasks:

• Information extraction: named entity recognition and relation recognition. (What is said in the text?)
• Emotion and Sentiment Analysis (What does the reader feel when reading the text? What opinion is she expressing? What did the author feel when writing the text).
• Fact Checking and Deception (Are the claims in the text true and can they be supported with trustworthy evidence? Is the author trying to deceive?)
• Conditional Text Generation (given several such variables, how can we then automatically generate texts) that contain/express the appropriate information/associations?

We work on these tasks with methods of machine learning, particularly deep learning, but also probabilistic graphical models.

The IEI Group currently consists of the following people:

• Yarik Menchaca-Resendiz (Emotion Analysis and Conditional Text Generation, DAAD Scholarship)
• Amelie Wührl (Biomedical Fact Checking, DFG Project FIBISS)
• Aswathy Velutharambath (External, funded by 100 Worte Sprachanalyse GmbH)
• Laura Oberländer (on leave, DFG Project CEAT)
• Sabine Dieterle (Secretary)

• Enrica Troiano (PhD student, 2023)
• Felix Armbrust (PhD student, 2022)
• Evgeny Kim (PhD student, 2020)
• Jeremy Barnes (SFB Scholarship Holder, 2019)
• Camilo Thorne (Postdoc, 2018)
• Ghazaal Sheikhi (visitor from U Bergen, 2022)
• Sofie Labat (visitor from U Ghent, 2022)
• Andreas Nugaard Holm (visitor from U Copenhagen, 2022)
• Rishika Bhagwatkar (DAAD WISE, 2021)
• Flor Miriam Plaza del Arco (2021, visiting from U Jaen)
• Mohamed Alshaer (2018, German University of Cairo)
• Gianluigi Marra (2018, Erasmus exchange, Uni Salento)