Currently I am working as research assistant and project leader at the Institute for Applied Computer Science and Formal Description Methods (AIFB)
at the University of Karlsruhe. My main interests are in the field of  Computational Linguistics as well as Knowledge Representation. In particular,
I mainly work at their intersection, looking at how Natural Language Processing and Understanding can exploit background knowledge as well as
how knowledge can be automatically acquired from texts. Recently, I have also got interested in approaches for search and question answering.

News:

    Finally, the book on "Ontology Learning and Population from Text: Algorithms, Evaluation and Applications"
    has appeared in November 2006
     Order here.

Other books:

    "Ontology Learning and from Text: Methods, Evaluation and Applications",
    co-edited with Paul Buitelaar and Bernardo Magnini, IOS Press 2005.
     Order here.

Publications

Activities:

• Session/Area Chair
• Chair of the Statistical Natural Language Processing Session of the 31st Annual Conference of the German Classification Society on Data Analysis, Machine Learning, and Applications
• PC Membership / Reviewing
• International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) / Asian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC)
• 1st IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC)
• Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
• 2nd International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies (SAMT)
• 20th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)
• 5th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC)
• Workshop on Web Content Mining with Human Language Technologies at the 5th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC)
• 15th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW)
• ECAI 2006 Workshop on Ontologies for Natural Language Processing
• 11th Conference the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL)
• Workshop on Knowledge Markup and Semantic Annotation (SemAnnot 2005) at the 4th International Semantic Web Conference
  
• Second International Workshop on Knowledge Discovery and Ontologies at ECML/PKDD 2005
  
• First International Workshop on Representation and Analysis of Web Space (RAWS)
  
• Workshop on Building and Applying Ontologies for the Semantic Web (BAOSW) at the 12th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence
• Workshop on Knowledge Markup and Semantic Annotation (SemAnnot 2004) at the 3rd International Semantic Web Conference
• Workshop on Knowledge Markup and Semantic Annotation at KCAP 2003
  
• Organized Workshops & Tutorials
• OLP2: 2nd Workshop on Ontology Learning and Population at COLING/ACL 2006
• Tutorial on "Ontology Learning from Text" at EACL 2006
• Tutorial on "Ontology Learning from Text" at ECML/PKDD 2005
• Workshop on the Application of Language and Semantic Technologies to support Knowledge Management Processes at EKAW 2004
• Invited Talks
• Invited talk on "Ontology Learning from Text in a Nutshell" at the European Media Lab (EML) , December 18th, 2006
• Invited speaker at the Workshop on Ontology Evolution and Multimedia Information Extraction (BOEMIE) held in conjunction with EKAW 2006 (slides)
• Invited speaker at the Summer School on Multimedia Semantics - Analysis, Annotation, Retrieval and Applications (2006) (slides)
• Invited 1-day course lecture at the HCI Postgraduate School at the University of Aalborg (slides)
• Regular Referee for the Journal of Data & Knowledge Engineering (DKE)
  

Awards:

•     Best Presentation Award at WWW 2004

Diplom- und Studienarbeiten

Links:

• Ontology Learning
• ORAKEL natural language interface
• Project on Learning Qualia Structures
• Text2Onto
• TextToOnto
  
• Hommingberger Gepardenforelle

Supervised Master Students (Diplomanden)

• Hans-Peter Zorn - "Semantisches Taggen von natüÃrlichsprahlichen Dialogen"
  (now at the European Media Lab (EML)
• Simon Sparn - "Erkennen von ontologischen Zusammenhängen aus Texten durch Kombination verschiedener Verfahren"
  (now at Seeburger)
• Katrin Tomanek - "Ontology-driven classification of named entities based on a machine learning approach"
  (now at the Jena University Language & Information Engineering Lab (JULIE))
• Laurent Cicurel - "Clustering of Polysemic Words"
  (now at ISOCO)
• Matthias Hartung - "Die Nutzung von Diskurswissen zum Zwecke der Informationsextraktion" (now at the Computational Linguistics Department of the University of Heidelberg)
  
• Johanna Wenderoth - "Design und Evaluierung eines Verfahrens zur automatischen Akquisition von Qualia Strukturen aus dem Web"