Chair of Computational Linguistics
Prof. Dr. Anette Frank

Contact
Institut für Computerlinguistik | email: frank sign cl sign uni-heidelberg sign de |
Im Neuenheimer Feld 325 | phone: +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 and the pages of my research group.
I am member of the standing reviewer committee of TACL.
Office Hours and Teaching
- Office hours: Please write an email for appointment!
- Writing a thesis or homework:
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.
For two new openings in our group see below!
News
- 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)
- 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
- Debjit Paul, Juri Opitz, Maria Becker, Jonathan Kobbe, Graeme Hirst and Anette Frank (2020): Argumentative Relation Classification with Background Knowledge., International Conference on Computational Models of Argument (COMMA 2020), *Best Student Paper Award Nomination* (3 runner-ups).
- Debjit Paul and Anette Frank (2020): Social Commonsense Reasoning with Multi-Head Knowledge Attention. Findings of EMNLP 2020.
- 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 (Special Issue: Argumentation Intelligence), 20, 131--141.
- Maria Becker, Katharina Korfhage and Anette Frank (2020): Implicit Knowledge in Argumentative Texts: An Annotated Corpus. Proceedings of LREC.
- Angel Daza and Anette Frank (2020): X-SRL: A Parallel Cross-Lingual Semantic Role Labeling Dataset. EMNLP 2020.
- Juri Opitz, Letitia Parcalabescu and Anette Frank: AMR Similarity Metrics from Principles, TACL.
- 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), to appear.
- Angel Daza and Anette Frank: Translate and Label! An Encoder-Decoder Approach for Cross-lingual Semantic Role Labeling, EMNLP 2019.
- Todor Mihaylov and Anette Frank: Discourse-Aware Semantic Self-Attention for Narrative Reading Comprehension, EMNLP 2019.
- Ioana Hulpus, Jonathan Kobbe, Christian Meilicke, Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Graeme Hirst, Maria Becker, Juri Opitz, Vivi Nastase and Anette Frank: Towards Explaining Natural Language Arguments with Background Knowledge, SemEx 2019@ISWC.
- Juri Opitz and Anette Frank (2019): Dissecting Content and Context in Argumentative Relation Analysis, Argument Mining@ACL 2019.
- Juri Opitz and Anette Frank (2019): Automatic Accuracy Prediction for AMR Parsing, *SEM 2019.
- Jonathan Kobbe, Juri Opitz, Maria Becker, Ioana Hulpus, Heiner Stuckenschmidt and Anette Frank (2019): Exploiting Background Knowledge for Argumentative Relation Classification, Second biennial conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK 2019), *Best Paper Award*.
- Debjit Paul and Anette Frank (2019): Ranking and selecting Multi-Hop Knowledge Paths to Better Predict Human Needs, NAACL 2019.
- Juri Opitz and Anette Frank (2018): Addressing the Winograd Schema Challenge as a Sequence Ranking Task, International Workshop on Language, Cognition and Computational Models (LCCM).
Current Projects
- New project in SSP RATIO: ACCEPT: Perspectivized Argument Knowledge Graphs for Deliberation Support (2021 - 2024)
- Between the lines - Knowledge-based Analysis of Argumentation in a formal Argumentation Inference System (SPP RATIO: Robust Argumentation Machines) (2018 - 2021)
- DFG Graduiertenkolleg: Adaptive Informationsaufbereitung aus Heterogenen Quellen (2015 - 2021)
Completed Projects
- Leibniz ScienceCampus: Empirical Linguistics and Computational Language Learning (2015 - 2020)
- CLARIN-D Curation Project: Semantic Annotation for Digital Humanities (2015 - 2016)
- CLARIN-D (2011 - 2014, 2014 - 2016)
- Coherence in Language Processing: Semantics beyond the Sentence (2011 - 2014)
- Ontology Modeling for Ritual Structure Research (2009 - 2013)
- The Role of Context in Language Processing (2011 - 2012)
- Turkologischer Anzeiger: Creation of a Translingual Database (2009 - 2010)
- SightSee: Synchronous Generation of Language and 3D-Scenes (2008 - 2010)
- SmartWeb (2006 - 2007)
- SALSA II (2004 - 2007; co-project leader, with Manfred Pinkal)
- Quetal (2003 - 2005; co-project leader)
- WhiteBoard (2001 - 2002; co-project leader)
Former Affiliations
- Language Technology Lab, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, DFKI, Saarbrücken (2000 - 2007)
- Multilingual Language and Technology (MLTT) group, Xerox Research Centre Europe, XRCE, Grenoble (1997 - 2000)
- Institute of Natural Language Processing (IMS), University of Stuttgart (1991 - 1997)