PROF. DR. ANETTE FRANK

Anette Frank

Contact

+49 6221 54-3247
Email (click to copy)
Institut für Computerlinguistik
Im Neuenheimer Feld 325
D-69120 Heidelberg
Germany
Please send email for appointments

Research Statement

My research focuses on discourse-oriented semantics using neural methods for advanced NLU tasks, such as reading comprehension, commonsense reasoning or argumentation analysis.

I am especially interested in combining neural machine learning methods with linguistic modeling and knowledge representation, which I believe will make NLP systems more powerful and robust, and deeper in modeling Natural Language Understanding.

The NLP group's work covers many themes in semantics-based NLP, including semantic role labeling, coreference, discourse relation parsing, natural language and commonsense inference as well as phenomena involving implicitness in language and commonsense NLU.

To make automatic Natural Language Understanding succeed, language needs to be situated in real-world contexts. We hence investigate multimodal language processing and how this can help in achieving situated language understanding.



nlp hd logo
See also the
 NLP Group pages: my Team, Projects & Publications!

and the the web pages of ICL, the Institute of Computational Linguistics at Heidelberg University

NEWS

2022
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Nov 22 Juri Opitz presents Semantically Structured Sentence (S3BERT) embeddings SBERT studies MR at AACL 2022. S3BERT enables highly efficient and explainable sentence similarity predictions, through fine-grained meaning aspects encoded in sub-symbolic subspaces.

Oct 22 I organized a Workshop on Inference and Summarization in Argumentation in the RATIO Symposium 2022.

Aug 22 ACCEPT organized a Shared Task on Predicting Validity and Novelty of arguments. Our report will be presented in the ArgMining Workshop 2022.

Jul 22 Laura Zeidler presents our paper on using CheckList to evaluate textual, graph-based and contextualized NLG evaluation metrics through the lens of Semantic Similarity Rating in the *SEM Conference at NAACL 2022.

Apr 22 We're celebrating another successful PhD defense: Debjit Paul defended his thesis on Social Commonsense Reasoning. graduation Congratulations for the fine work and best of luck for your ongoing journey!

Apr 22: Neural Natural Language Generation: A Survey on Multilinguality, Multimodality, Controllability and Learning has now appeared in JAIR.
A joint effort of members of the COST Action Multi3Generation: Multi-task, Multilingual, Multi-modal. Enjoy!

Feb 22: Our paper VALSE 💃: A Task-Independent Benchmark for Vision and Language Models Centered on Linguistic Phenomena was accepted at ACL 2022 Main!

Feb 22: award Todor Mihaylov and Bich-Ngoc Do both defended their PhD thesis this month. We're very prowd of their work.
Congratulations!

Jan 22: I'm proud to have been selected as one of eight ACL fellows in 2021
award for integrative work in linguistically informed, technically well-founded semantics- and discourse-oriented natural language processing.

Thank you ACL and thanks to all my collaborators!

2021
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Nov 21: Juri Opitz and members of ACCEPT won the Best Paper Award award in the ArgMining Workshop @EMNLP!

Nov 21: I've been recognized as outstanding reviewer for EMNLP 2021.

Nov 21: I will give a panelist talk in the ArgMining Workhop 2021.

Oct 21: I will give a Keynote Speech at CLAR 2021

Oct 21: So excited to congratulate Prof. Dr. Nils Reiter

  • former PhD student and member of the NLP group, sun umbrella
  • a passionate of Digital Humanities and teaching
  • to his recent appointment
    as Professor of Digital Humanities & Natural Language Processing
    at the University of Cologne. — Congratulations!

Sep 21: We have a paper accepted for the ArgMining Workshop at EMNLP!

Aug 21: Now serving as Action Editor for TACL!

Aug 21: We have new paper accepted for Transactions of the ACL!

  • on advanced graph-based similarity metrics for AMR
  • offering a novel benchmark for AMR similarity
  • Juri Opitz, Angel Daza and Anette Frank (to appear):
    Weisfeiler-Leman in the BAMBOO: Novel AMR Graph Metrics and a Benchmark for AMR Graph Similarity. Already available on ArXiv

RESEARCH

My research focuses on discourse-oriented semantics using neural methods for advanced NLU tasks, such as reading comprehension, commonsense reasoning or argumentation analysis.

Current research themes include:

KNOWLEDGE-BASED LANGUAGE PROCESSING
  • Machine Reading Comprehension
  • (Social) Commonsense Reasoning
  • Computational Argumentation
  • Hypothetical, Counterfactual and Abductive Inference
NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION
  • Meaning-based NLG Evaluation Metrics
  • Reconstructing Implicit Knowledge in Text
STRUCTURED MEANING REPRESENTATIONS
  • Representing Events and their Participants
  • Resolving Anaphora
MULTIMODAL VISION & LANGUAGE PROCESSING
  • Grounding Language in Images
  • Multimodal Fusion

Research areas I have been working on in the past:

ONTOLOGIES FOR SEMANTIC PROCESSING AND REPRESENTATION

  • Information extraction (relation extraction, temporal processing)
  • Multilingual question-answering
  • Ontology-based lexicon modelling

CORPUS-BASED GRAMMAR INDUCTION AND LEXICON ACQUISITION

  • Creation and use of treebanks and annotated corpora
  • Corpus-based induction of treebanks, grammars, and lexicon resources
  • Crosslingual resource induction using parallel corpora
SEMANTICS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
  • Semantics construction and dynamic semantics, esp. Discourse Representation Theory
  • Scope and underspecification
  • Lexical semantics
  • Modality, propositional attitudes and discourse subordination
  • Temporal analysis
  • Textual entailment
MULTILINGUAL SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC PROCESSING
  • Grammar formalisms and grammar engineering techniques
  • Multilingual syntactic analysis
  • Multilingual semantic analysis and resource creation
  • Grammar-based machine translation

CURRICULUM VITAE

Academic degrees

2002

Habilitation in Computational Linguistics

Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS)
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Stuttgart, Germany

1997

Dissertation in Computational Linguistics

Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS)
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Stuttgart, Germany

1991

Master of Arts (Magister) in Linguistics (major)
Computer Science (minor) and Romance Linguistics (minor)

Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS)
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Stuttgart, Germany

Studies

1988 - 1991

Studies of Linguistics, Computer Science and Romance Linguistics

University of Stuttgart, Germany

1984 - 1988

Studies of German and Romance Literature and Linguistics

University of Heidelberg, Germany

Employment

since 2007

Professor of Computational Linguistics

Department of Computational Linguistics
University of Heidelberg, Germany

2000 - 2007

Senior Researcher

Language Technology Lab, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
DFKI, Saarbrücken, Germany

SS 2002

Teaching replacement (C4 Professorship, CL)

Institute for Natural Language Processing
IMS, University of Stuttgart, Germany

1997 - 2000

Researcher

MultiLingual Theory and Technology Lab
Xerox Research Centre Europe, XRCE, Grenoble, France

1991 - 1997

Researcher

Institute for Natural Language Processing
IMS, University of Stuttgart, Germany

Student Employment

1988 - 1991

Research Assistent

Institute for Natural Language Processing
IMS, University of Stuttgart, Germany

1986 - 1988

Freelancer

IBM Scientific Research Center Heidelberg, Germany

1985 - 1986

Teaching Assistant

Lycee George de la Tour, Nancy, France

For more information please consult my personal CV.

PUBLICATIONS

2024
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ViLMA: A Zero-Shot Benchmark for Linguistic and Temporal Grounding in Video-Language Models

Kesen, I., Pedrotti, A., Dogan, M., Cafagna, M., Acikgoz, E., Parcalabescu, L., Calixto, I., Frank, A., Gatt, A., Erdem, A., Erdem, E. (2024)

arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.07022.

Graph Language Models

Plenz, M., Frank, A. (2024)

arXiv.
2023
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SETI: Systematicity Evaluation of Textual Inference

Fu, X., Frank, A. (2023)

Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, Toronto, Canada.

ACCEPT at SemEval-2023 Task 3: An Ensemble-based Approach to Multilingual Framing Detection

Heinisch, P., Plenz, M., Frank, A., Cimiano, P. (2023)

Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023), Toronto, Canada.

SMARAGD: Learning SMatch for Accurate and Rapid Approximate Graph Distance

Opitz, J., Meier, P., Frank, A. (2023)

Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2023) , Nancy, France.

AMR4NLI: Interpretable and robust NLI measures from semantic graphs

Opitz, J., Wein, S., Steen, J., Frank, A., Schneider, N. (2023)

Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2023), Nancy, France.

MM-SHAP: A Performance-agnostic Metric for Measuring Multimodal Contributions in Vision and Language Models & Tasks

Parcalabescu, L., Frank, A. (2023)

Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’23), Toronto, Canada.

Similarity-weighted Construction of Contextualized Commonsense Knowledge Graphs for Knowledge-intense Argumentation Tasks

Plenz, M., Opitz, J., Heinisch, P., Cimiano, P., Frank, A. (2023)

Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), Toronto, Canada.

Exploring Large Language Models for Classical Philology

Riemenschneider, F., Frank, A. (2023)

Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’23), Toronto, Canada.

Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit. Detecting Latin Allusions to Ancient Greek Literature

Riemenschneider, F., Frank, A. (2023)

Proceedings of the Ancient Language Processing Workshop, Varna, Bulgaria.

On Measuring Faithfulness of Natural Language Explanations

Parcalabescu, L., Frank, A. (2023)

arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.07466.
2022
+ -

MAGMA – Multimodal Augmentation of Generative Models through Adapter-based Finetuning

Eichenberg, C., Black, S., Weinbach, S., Parcalabescu, L., Frank, A. (2022)

Findings of EMNLP.

Neural Natural Language Generation: A Survey on Multilinguality, Multimodality, Controllability and Learning

Erdem, E., Kuyu, M., Yagcioglu, S., Frank, A., Parcalabescu, L., Plank, B., Babii, A., Turuta, O., Erdem, A., Calixto, I., Lloret, E., Apostol, E., Truica, C., Sandrih, B., Gatt, A., Martincic-Ipsic, S., Berend, G., Korvel, G. (2022)

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR).

Strategies for Framing Argumentative Conclusion Generation

Heinisch, P., Frank, A., Opitz, J., Cimiano, P. (2022)

Proceedings of the 15th International Natural Language Generation Conference.

Data Augmentation for Improving the Prediction of Validity and Novelty of Argumentative Conclusions

Heinisch, P., Plenz, M., Opitz, J., Frank, A., Cimiano, P. (2022)

Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining (ArgMining), Online and in Gyeongju, Republic of Korea.

Overview of the 2022 Validity and Novelty Prediction Shared Task

Heinisch, P., Frank, A., Opitz, J., Plenz, M., Cimiano, P. (2022)

Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining (ArgMining), Online and in Gyeongju, Republic of Korea.

Better Smatch = Better Parser? AMR evaluation is not so simple anymore

Opitz, J., Frank, A. (2022)

Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Evaluation & Comparison of NLP Systems (Eval4NLP 2022) ,co-located at AACL 2022.

SBERT studies Meaning Representations: Decomposing Sentence Embeddings into Explainable Semantic Features

Opitz, J., Frank, A. (2022)

Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (AACL-IJCNLP 2022), Online.

VALSE💃: A Task-Independent Benchmark for Vision and Language Models Centered on Linguistic Phenomena

Parcalabescu, L., Cafagna, M., Muradjan, L., Frank, A., Calixto, I., Gatt, A. (2022)

Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

A Dynamic, Interpreted CheckList for Meaning-oriented NLG Metric Evaluation – through the Lens of Semantic Similarity Rating

Zeidler, L., Opitz, J., Frank, A. (2022)

Proceedings of the 11th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM).

TEACHING

REGULAR CLASSES

  • Introduction to Computational Linguistics
    Lectures with exercises, 4 SWS (2007-2012)

  • Formal and Computational Syntax
    Lectures with exercises, 4 SWS (since 2008)

  • Formal and Computational Semantics
    Lectures with exercises, 4 SWS (since 2013)

  • Computational Linguistics Colloquium

SEMINARS (SELECTION)

  • Natural Language Generation

  • New Dvlpmts in NN Architectures & Representation Learning for NLU Tasks

  • Knowledge Acquisition and Inference for Complex NLP Tasks

  • New Developments in Semantic Parsing and Discourse Analysis

  • Semantic Discourse Processing

  • From Information Extraction to Deep Semantic Parsing

  • Semantic NLP – from a discourse perspective

  • Data-driven Methods in NLP

SUPERVISION (BA and MA Theses)

  • I supervise a considerable number of student theses.
    You find them listed on this page. Main supervisor listed first.

  • Here you find guidelines for how to write (or not to write) a thesis:
    My collection of Dos and Don'ts when writing a thesis
    Guidelines by Katarina Klein, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
    Guidelines by Maria Lieber, TU Dresden
    LaTeX-Vorlage des Instituts für Computerlinguistik, Heidelberg.

SUPERVISION

Ph.D Supervision (advisor)
Completed theses

2023

Juri Opitz
Metrics of Graph-Based Meaning Representations with Applications from Parsing Evaluation to Explainable NLG Evaluation and Semantic Search

Advisor and 1st Examiner: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank
2nd Examiner: Prof. Dr. Sebastian Pado

2022

Debjit Paul
Social Commonsense Reasoning with Unstructured and Structured Knowledge

Advisor and 1st Examiner: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank
2nd Examiner: Prof. Dr. Michael Strube

Todor Mihaylov
Knowledge-Enhanced Neural Networks for Machine Reading Comprehension

Advisor and 1st Examiner: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank
2nd Examiner: Prof. Dr. Sebastian Riedel

2021

Angel Daza
Cross-lingual Semantic Role Labeling through Translation and Multilingual Learning

Advisor and 1st Examiner: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank
2nd Examiner: Prof. Dr. Sebastian Pado

Maria Becker
Building Bridges - Reconstructing Implicit Information in Argumentative Texts using Commonsense Knowledge

Advisor and 1st Examiner: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank
2nd Examiner: Prof. Dr. Andreas Witt

2019

Ana Marasoviç
Deep Learning with Sentiment Inference for Discourse-Oriented Opinion Analysis

Advisor and 1st Examiner: Prof. Dr. A. Frank
2nd Examiner: Prof. Dr. M. Strube
External Examiner: Prof. Dr. B. Webber

2015

Matthias Hartung
Distributional Semantic Models of Attribute Meaning in Adjectives and Nouns

Advisor and 1st Examiner: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank
2nd Examiner: Prof. Dr. Sebastian Pado

2013

Nils Reiter
Discovering Structural Similarities in Narrative Texts using Event Alignment Algorithms

Advisor and 1st Examiner: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank
2nd Examiner: Prof. Dr. Sebastian Pado

Michael Roth
Inducing Implicit Arguments via Cross-document Alignment – A Framework and its Applications

Advisor and 1st Examiner: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank
2nd Examiner: Prof. Dr. Michael Strube

Ph.D Supervision (second advisor)

2022

Federico Lopez
Learning Neural Graph Representations in Non-Euclidean Geometries

Advisor and 1st Examiner: Prof. Dr. Michael Strube
2nd Examiner: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank

Bich-Ngoc Do
Neural Techniques for German Dependency Parsing

1st Advisor and Examiner: Dr. Ines Rehbein
2nd Advisor and Examiner: Prof. Dr. A. Frank

2021

Benjamin Heinzerling
Aspects of Coherence for Entity Analysis

1st Advisor and Examiner: Prof. Dr. Michael Strube
2nd Advisor and Examiner: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank

2015

Benjamin Börschinger
Exploring human lexical acquisition using Bayesian modelling

Co-Tutelle Macquarie University and Heidelberg University
1st Advisor: Prof. Mark Johnson
2nd Advisor: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank

2008

Aljoscha Burchardt
Modeling Textual Entailment with Role-Semantic Information

Saarland University
1st Advisor: Prof. Dr. Manfred Pinkal
2nd advisor: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank

2005

Stefanie Dipper
Implementing and Documenting Large-Scale Grammars -- German LFG

University of Stuttgart
1st Advisor: Prof. Dr. C. Rohrer
2nd advisor: PD Dr. Anette Frank

Ph.D Supervision (External Examinar in Ph.D. Committees)

2022

Sabine Weber
Unsupervised German Predicate Entailment Using The Distributional Inclusion Hypothesis

University of Edinburgh
Advisor: Prof. Mark Steedman
Internal Examiner: Alexandra Birch-Mayne, Ph.D.
External Examiner: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank

2020

Rik van Noord
Character-based Neural Semantic Parsing

University of Groningen
Advisor: Prof. Dr. Johan Bos
External Examiners: Prof. Dr. Michael Biehl, Prof. Dr. Anette Frank and Prof. Dr. Mirella Lapata

Viktor Alexander Judea
Global Inference and Local Syntax Representations of Events

Heidelberg University
Advisor: Prof. Dr. Michael Strube
2nd Examiner: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank

2018

Parvin Sadat Feizabadi
Strategies to Address Data Sparseness in Implicit Semantic Role Labeling

Heidelberg University
Advisor: Prof. Dr. Sebastian Pado, Stuttgart University
2nd Examiner: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank, Heidelberg University

2017

Chunyang Xiao
Neural-Symbolic Learning for Semantic Parsing

Université de Lorraine
Advisors: Claire Gardent, LORIA, Nancy and Marc Dymetman, Naver Labs Europe, Grenoble, France
External Examiners: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank and Prof. Mark Steedman

2015

Britta Dorothee Zeller
Induction, Semantic Validation and Evaluation of a Derivational Morphology Lexicon for German

Heidelberg University
Advisor: Prof. Dr. Sebastian Pado
External Examiner: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank

Angela Petra Fahrni
Joint Discourse-aware Concept Disambiguation and Clustering

Heidelberg University
Advisor: Prof. Dr. Michael Strube
External Examiner: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank

2013

Jie Cai
Coreference Resolution via Hypergraph Partitioning

Heidelberg University
Advisor: Prof. Dr. Michael Strube
External Examiner: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank

2010

Ineta Sejane
Wissensrepräsentation Linguistik. Modellierung, Potenzial und Grenzen am Beispiel der Ontologie zur deutschen Grammatik

Heidelberg University
Advisor: Prof. Dr. C. v. Stutterheim
External Examiner: Prof. Dr. A. Frank

Nathalie Schluter
Treebank-Based Deep Grammar Acquisition for FrenchIneta Sejane

Dublin City University, School of Computing
Advisor: Prof. Dr. Josef van Genabith
Internal Examiner: Dr. Deirdre Hogan
External Examiner: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank

2009

Silke Scheible
A Computational Treatment of Superlatives

University of Edinburgh
Advisor: Prof. Bonnie Webber
Internal Examiner: Prof. Ewan Klein
External Examiner: Prof. Dr. Anette frank

2007

Gerd Fliedner
Linguistically Informed Question Answering

Saarland University
Advisor: Prof. Dr. Manfred Pinkal
External Examiner: Prof. Dr. Anette Frank

2006

Frank H. Müller
A Finite State Approach to Shallow Parsing and Grammatical Functions Annotation of German

University of Tübingen
Advisor: Prof. Dr. E. Hinrichs
External Examiner: PD Dr. Anette Frank

HABILITATION

2022

Dr. Sabine Tittel
Integration von historischer lexikalischer Semantik und Ontologien in den Digital Humanities. Mit Materialien des Altfranzösischen, des Mittelfranzösischen und Altgasconischen als Linked Data ins Semantic Web

Universität Heidelberg
Mentors: Prof. Dr. Sybille Große, Prof. Dr. Anette Frank, Prof. Dr. Vahram Atayan