I am an Assistant Professor in Computer Science with focus on "Databases and Data Engineering " at the University of St.Gallen (HSG).

I am passionate about teaching machines how to read and comprehend human languages. In particular, I am interested in developing intelligent systems that are able to automatically understand and process the meaning of information at scale. To achieve this goal, my work concentrates on the extraction of knowledge from big textual data, resulting in a structured representation in the form of a knowledge graph that is machine-readable and machine-interpretable, and thus facilitates inferencing. A typical use case of such knowledge bases is the population of databases. When dealing with large-scale textual data, I routinely apply data engineering techniques in terms of data acquisition and data preparation.

My research is characterized by interdisciplinarity and a broad range of application areas, including Conversational Agents and Argument Mining in E-Learning. My core research interests are Knowledge Representation, Information Extraction, Data Mining, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning; detours include technology-enhanced learning and Information Retrieval. I have a proven record in NLP research. Today, my publication list includes 12 peer-reviewed papers that were published in top-tier academic NLP conferences.

In 2022, I graduated "summa cum laude" from the University of Passau, Germany, with a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

Research Interests

• Knowledge Extraction & Representation:
  • Sentence & Discourse Representation
  • Data & Knowledge Extraktion, Knowledge Graphs and Linked Data
  • Information Extraction & Database Population
• Argument Mining:
  • Argument Generation
  • Argument Evaluation & Comprehension
  • Argument Mining in E-Learning
• Conversational AI:
  • Text Generation
  • Text Simplification & Summarization
  • Dialogue Systems

Education

• Ph.D. in Computer Science (2022), University of Passau, Germany
• M.Sc. in Computer Science (2016), University of Passau, Germany
• B.Sc. in Applied Computer Science (2011), University of Bamberg, Germany

News

• (Sep. 2022) My doctoral thesis, entitled "From Complex Sentences to a Formal Semantic Representation using Syntactic Text Simplification and Open Information Extraction", was published by Springer Vieweg.
• (Sep. 2022) Our paper on Shallow Discourse Parsing for Open Information Extraction and Text Simplification got accepted at the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI 2022).
• (Aug. 2022) I started as Assistant Professor in Computer Science with focus on "Databases and Data Engineering" at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.
• (June 2022) Our paper got accepted at the Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning III (NALOMA22) Workshop.
• (Mar. 2022) I graduated "summa cum laude" from the University of Passau, Germany, with a Ph.D. in Computer Science.
• (Jan. 2022) Our paper on Modeling Persuasive Discourse to Adaptively Support Students’ Argumentative Writing got accepted at ACL 2022.

Reviewing Activities

Conferences

• PC Member of the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR)
• Reviewer for the ACL Rolling Review (ARR)
• Reviewer for the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2022)
• Reviewer for the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguis- tics (ACL 2022)
• Reviewer for the 2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2022)
• Reviewer for the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2021)
• Reviewer for the Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
• Reviewer for the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2021)
• Reviewer for the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2020)
• Reviewer for the 24th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2020)
• Reviewer for the 25th International Conference on Natural Language & Information Systems (NLDB 2020)

Journals

• Reviewer for the International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making
• Reviewer for the Journal on Language Resources and Evaluation
• Reviewer for the Elsevier Journal on Knowledge-Based Systems
• Reviewer for the Journal on Data & Knowledge Engineering
• Reviewer for the Northern European Journal of Language Technology