I teach a class on Sentiment Analysis in the CL Department at the University of Heidelberg in the summer term 2009. -- Together with Anette Frank I also lead the PhD colloquium there.

Our annotation tool MMAX2 is still very popular: 1082 downloads in 2008! Download it at Sourceforge. Read our latest paper about it.

Two new projects in the NLP group:
1. A project on semantic-driven synchronous generation of language and 3D scenes funded in the framework of the Innovation Fonds for Frontier Research of the Excellence Initiative at the University of Heidelberg. We work together with the Computational Linguistics Department and the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing at the University of Heidelberg.
2. JUMAS -- Judicial Management by Digital Libraries Semantics. An IST-STREP project funded by the European Commision.

I teach an undergraduate class on Text Summarization in the CL Department at the University of Heidelberg in the summer term 2008.

Paper accepted at the European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC '08), a conference with a 19% acceptance rate, co-authored by Cäcilia Zirn, Vivi Nastase and myself: "Distinguishing between Instances and Classes in the Wikipedia Taxonomy" (PDF).

Upcoming presentations this fall:
November 23rd, 2007: ICCS/HCRC Seminar at the University of Edinburgh -- cancelled because of some other seemingly more important obligation on the same day
December 6th, 2007: Computer Science Colloquium at Harvard University

I teach an undergraduate class on Natural Language Generation in the CL Department at the University of Heidelberg this fall. I hope that the students learn as much on NLG as I do as I am not yet an expert on that topic.

Paper published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) co-authored by Simone Paolo Ponzetto and myself: "Knowledge Derived from Wikipedia for Computing Semantic Relatedness" (PDF).

Paper published in the Journal of Logic, Language and Information (JoLLI). It is about part of our work in Natural Language Generation, entitled "The German Vorfeld and Local Coherence" and co-authored by Katja Filippova and myself.

October 29th, 2007: Computer Science Colloquium at the CS department of the University of Mannheim

Paper at AAAI'07 in the special track on AI and the Web accepted! The paper is entitled "Deriving a large scale taxonomy from Wikipedia" and co-authored by Simone Paolo Ponzetto and myself (download below).

Paper at ACL'07 accepted! Katja Filippova and myself will report our recent work on natural language generation: "Generating Constituent Order in German Clauses" (download below).

Simone Paolo Ponzetto and myself will participate in a six week JHU Summer Workshop on Exploiting Lexical & Encyclopedic Resources For Entity Disambiguation.

ESSLLI 2007 course on Exploiting Wikipedia for Research in NLP
(Slides: Part 1 (1.3MB), Part 2 (1.4MB), References).