Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg

Chair of Computational Linguistics

Prof. Dr. Anette Frank

Anette Frank

Contact

Institut für Computerlinguistik        email: frank sign cl sign uni-heidelberg sign de
Im Neuenheimer Feld 325phone: +49-(0)6221/54-3247
D-69120 Heidelberg sek: +49-(0)6221/54-3245
Germany fax: +49-(0)6221/54-3242

Research

My research focuses on statistical - nowadays mostly neural - NLP methods for discourse-oriented semantic analysis and information access tasks with the aim of improving computational natural language understanding.

For more information please consult my research and publication pages as well as my personal CV, and the pages of my research group,.

After years of service as elite reviewer for TACL, I am now action editor for TACL.

Office Hours and Teaching

Job Applications

I am always interested in highly qualified doctoral students, and I do look at the applications sent to me!
Please understand that I am not able to respond to individual inquiries, and do not send reminders.

News

  • I'll be giving a panelist discussion talk in the Eighth ArgMining Workshop @EMNLP.
  • I'll give an invited talk at CLAR 2021, the 4th International Conference on Logic and Argumentation, in October.
  • Two new papers have been accepted at TACL and the ArgMining Workshop @EMNLP:
    • Weisfeiler-Leman in the BAMBOO: Novel AMR Graph Metrics and a Benchmark for AMR Graph Similarity, by Juri Opitz, Angel Daza and Anette Frank, to appear in Transactions of the ACL. The preprint is available on arXiv.
    • Explainable Unsupervised Argument Similarity Rating with Abstract Meaning Representation and Conclusion Generation, by Juri Opitz, Philipp Heinisch, Philipp Wiesenbach, Philipp Cimiano and Anette Frank, all members of our new collaborative research project ACCEPT: Perspectivized Argument Knowledge Graphs for Deliberation Support. The paper will appear in the Eighth ArgMining Workshop @EMNLP.
    Congratulations to all authors!
  • Happy to announce that our paper Reconstructing Implicit Knowledge with Language Models by Maria Becker, Siting Liang and myself has earned the Best Paper Award at DeeLIO: The 2nd Workshop on Knowledge Extraction and Integration for Deep Learning Architectures at NAACL 2021. With this we conclude our work in ExpLAIN in the SSP RATIO project.
  • Eight papers from the NLP Group have been accepted at ACL-IJCNLP, *SEM, IWPT and other venues, on interpretation and reasoning in NLU and NLG using Commonsense Knowledge, on Multilingual AMR Parsing, and on Multimodal Image and Language processsing. All details can be found here. Congratulations to all authors!
  • I'll be Action Editor for TACL starting July 2021. Looking forward to this change in contribution to one of our premium publication venues!

  • Maria Becker and Katharina Korfhage present CoCo-Ex in the EACL 2021 Demonstrations Track. CoCo-Ex: A Tool For Linking Concepts From Texts To ConceptNet allows users to ground ConceptNet concepts in textual sequences. Find paper, code and video at EACL 2021.

  • Happy to announce a new paper accepted for EACL 2021: Towards a Decomposable Metric for Explainable Evaluation of Text Generation from AMR, by Juri Opitz and Anette Frank. Pre-print available from arXiv.

  • We have two openings for PhD candidates:
    • A doctoral scholarship in Natural Language Understanding and Generation
    • A PhD position in our new DFG project ACCEPT in the priority program RATIO (Robust Argumentation Machines)
    Please find all relevant information about the positions and how to apply here.

  • We have a new project accepted in the 2nd phase of the DFG Priority Program RATIO: Robust Argumentation Machines. The project ACCEPT: Perspectivized Argument Knowledge Graphs for Deliberation Support will be jointly conducted by Prof. Anette Frank and Prof. Philipp Cimiano (University Bielefeld).

  • I'm delighted that the PC of EMNLP 2020 has recognized my service as Area Chair for the conference, selecting me as one of several Outstanding Area Chairs. Thanks! It's nice that such efforts are recognised.
  • I'm also very pleased that Juri Opitz, one of my PhD students in the Heidelberg NLP Group was recognized as Outstanding Reviewer of the EMNLP 2020 conference. Congrats!

  • Two long papers by members of the NLP group have been accepted for EMNLP 2020
    • X-SRL: A Parallel Cross-Lingual Semantic Role Labeling Dataset, by Angel Daza and Anette Frank, to appear in the Proceedings of EMNLP. The publication is based on work within the LiMo project
    • Social Commonsense Reasoning with Multi-Head Knowledge Attention, by Debjit Paul and Anette Frank, to appear in Findings at EMNLP.
  • The paper Argumentative Relation Classification with Background Knowledge, by Debjit Paul, Juri Opitz, Maria Becker, Jonathan Kobbe, Graeme Hirst, and Anette Frank earned a nomination for the best student paper award at the COMMA 2020 Conference! Congratulations to all authors!

  • Three new publications by members of the NLP group and colleagues:
    • Juri Opitz, Letitia Parcalabescu and Anette Frank (2020): AMR Similarity Metrics from Principles. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Vol. 8, pp. 522-538. [html]
    • Debjit Paul, Juri Opitz, Maria Becker, Jonathan Kobbe, Graeme Hirst, and Anette Frank (2020): Argumentative Relation Classification with Background Knowledge. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computational Models of Argument (COMMA 2020) [html]
    • Maria Becker, Ioana Hulpus, Debjit Paul, Juri Opitz, Jonathan Kobbe, Heiner Stuckenschmidt and Anette Frank (2020): Explaining Arguments with Background Knowledge. Towards Knowledge-based Argumentation Analysis. Datenbank Spektrum 20:131–141, Special Issue: Argumentation Intelligence. [DOI]
  • In the newest issue of Heidelberg University's research magazine on “Machine & Humanâ€, Anette Frank and Katja Markert discuss "The Challenges of Teaching Machines to Understand Human Language". They discuss current work of their research groups and argue that both commonsense knowledge and creativity - which humans master so easily - are still a challenge for automatic language processing algorithms. Enjoy!

  • New publication: Letitia Parcalabescu and Anette Frank: Exploring Phrase Grounding without Training: Contextualisation and Extension to Text-Based Image Retrieval. Workshop on Multimodal Learning (at CVPR 2020), [pdf].
  • I will be Area Chair in the track Semantics: Sentence level, Textual Inference and Other area" for EMNLP 2020. Looking forward to a great conference!
  • I will be Area Chair in the track Textual Inference and Other Areas of Semantics for ACL 2020 in Seattle.
  • Letitia Parcalabescu and myself are participating in the newly established COST Action Multi3Generation: Multi-task, Multilingual, Multi-modal Language Generation, led by Isabelle Augenstein. We are members of the COST Action's management committee as representatives for Germany. Looking forward to collaborating in this great network activity.
  • Three members of the NLP group will attend EurNLP 2019 in London to present and discuss their research:

    • 
Todor Mihaylov: Discourse-Aware Semantic Self-Attention for Narrative Reading Comprehension
    • Letitia Parcalabescu: Unsupervised Text to Scene Graph Alignment with WordNet Neighborhood
    • Debjit Paul: Graph-based Multi-Hop Commonsense Knowledge

Selected new publications

Current Projects

Completed Projects

Former Affiliations

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