Updates will be posted on my new group's site: https://www.inf.uni-hamburg.de/sems

Highlights

2021

• I will be joining the University of Hamburg as an assistant professor (W1TTW2) with tenure track! I am super excited and looking forward to investigating semantic systems, Knowledge Graphs, Information Extraction and Question Answering. There are also up to 4 Ph.D. positions available. Get in touch!

2020

• The SPEAKER concept phase final report is here!
• I have co-organized the SMART Task Challenge at ISWC 2020 and results are in, check them out! SMART Task Website
• The book "Rich Search and Discovery for Research Datasets" is now available as Open Access including one chapter about our Rich Context Competition approach
• According to https://aminer.cn/ai2000/country/Germany I am among the top-100 influential German #AI scholars for knowledge engineering, see also https://aminer.cn/ai2000 . Take this ranking with a grain of salt w.r.t. fairness!
• Together with Diego Collarana, we are organizing the 6th NLIWOD workshop @ ISWC 2020. I am looking forward to read your paper :)
• We are also organizing the SMART - Semantic Answer Type Prediction Task @ ISWC 2020. Feel free to join the challenge.

2019

• Since October I am officially the Team Leader Conversational AI at our Fraunhofer branch in Dresden. I focus on growing research excellence and the team as well as on transferring our knowledge to industry and society.
• We are organizing the KI-Innovationsprojekt SPEAKER - Sprachassistenzplatform Made in Germany. There, I lead the technological and scientific development of semantic natural language understanding and dialogue modules. If you are interested in joining the platform, send me a message.
• We got the 2nd place at BMW Technologietag project pitch slam, Dingolfing, 2019 "Qualitätsmanagement bei der additiven Fertigung von automobilen Serienbauteilen mittels In-Line-Prozessüberwachung sowie Datenanalyse mit Statistik und neuronalen Netzen" with Martin Jaretzki from Fraunhofer IWU as main idea driver.
• Since April 1st, 2019 I am the Lead Research Engineer for Conversational AI at Fraunhofer IAIS at its new location in Dresden, Germany!
• I will start a new position in April 2019, stay tuned :)
• I gave an interview about the combination of Deep Learning and Knowledge Graphs: SEMANTiCS interview on KG, DL, NLP and QA
• I am proud to be the Linked Data track chair for the ESWC 2019 as well as the P&D chair for the SEMANTiCS 2019
• We are among the top-4 teams at the Rich Context Competition

2018

• We took part in the TREC Incident Stream Challenge 2018 comparing classical ML approaches with a combination of knowledge graph and deep learning.
• We also took part in the Rich Context Competition 2018 where we use a combination of specially trained CRFs and word embeddings.
• I am a speaker at the Bibliothekssymposium Wildau. I will be talking about Text Mining in Large Research Data and how to get insights out of it.
• I joined the scientific advisory board of FID MOVE to steer future mobility research expert systems
• Check out the demo of our novel DBpedia chatbot
• For the 4th time, we are continuing the NLIWOD workshop series including the QALD 9 challenge
• We are also organizing the Scalable Question Answering over Linked Data challenge at ESWC 2018

2017

• We also kicked successfully kicked off our new project on Question Answering for Civil Safety: SOLIDE (08/17 - 06/20)
• I was invited to speak at the Web Intelligence Summer School 2017 https://wiss.univ-st-etienne.fr/en/programm.html
• We kicked off our new traffic open data project LIMBO (6/17 - 5/20) https://www.limbo-project.org/
• I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis and joined the Data Science group at the University of Paderborn
• We are organizing also the NLIWOD3 workshop and QALD-8 open challenge
• We are organizing the QALD-7 challenge

2016

• We were nominated as runner up for Best Paper at KESW. Read our paper about Requirements to Modern Semantic Search Engines.
• I submitted my PhD thesis, a first version, as well as the online erratum, can be found here.
• We started a collection of utils, datasets, and systems for Question Answering and Natural Language Interfaces in general
• We are supporting the next round of the QALD challenge by creating a hybrid QA gold standard Read more
• Our Eurostars project DIESEL and QAMEL are both entering the implementation phase by April. If you have any suggestions or want information, contact us. Read more about DIESEL
• Currently, I am chair of the W3C Community Group for Natural Language Interfaces for the Web of data. Join us!

2015

• We participated in the 2nd annual Question Answering (QA) meetup. Read more
• HAWK, our hybrid question answering framework won the 2nd prize at QALD 5 - task 2 2015!
• Evaluating Entity Annotators using GERBIL won the Best Demo Award at ESWC 2015!
• CETUS – A Baseline Approach to Type Extraction by Michael Röder, Axel Ngonga and me won task 2 of the Open Knowledge Extraction Challenge (OKE) 2015.

2014

• AGDISTIS, our Named Entity Disambiguation Tool won the Best Research Paper Award at the ISWC 2014.
• We initiated the annual meetup for Question Answering (QA) systems. Contact me for further information! Read more about our first meeting!
• Our paper CROCUS: Cluster-based Ontology Data Cleansing got elected for the Best of Workshops Series at ESWC 2014. An extended version is available here.
• Our submission Cross-Document Coreference Resolution using Latent Features to the LD4IE workshop at ISWC 2014 was elected for the Best of Workshop Series.

If you want to write your Bachelor or Master thesis within the Semantic Web area do not hesitate to contact me!

Video Lectures

Web-Scale Extension of RDF Knowledge Bases from Templated Websites - ISWC 2014

Developing a Sustainable Platform for Entity Annotation Benchmarks - ESWC 2015

HAWK – Hybrid Question Answering using Linked Data - ESWC 2015

Designing modern enterprise search systems: the DIESEL case - KESW 2016