DFKI-NLP is a Natural Language Processing group of researchers, software engineers and students at the Berlin office of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) working on basic and applied research in areas covering, among others, information extraction, knowledge base population, dialogue, sentiment analysis, and summarization. We are particularly interested in core research on learning in low-resource settings, reasoning over larger contexts, and continual learning. We strive for a deeper understanding of human language and thinking, with the goal of developing novel methods for processing and generating human language text, speech, and knowledge. An important part of our work is the creation of corpora, the evaluation of NLP datasets and tasks, and the explainability of (neural) models.

Key topics:

  • Applied / domain-specific information extraction
  • Learning in low-resource settings and over large contexts
  • Construction and analysis of IE datasets, linguistic annotation
  • Multilingual information extraction
  • Evaluation methodology research
  • Explainability

Our group forms a part of DFKI’s Speech and Language Technology department led by Prof. Sebastian Möller, and closely collaborates with e.g. the Technische Universität Berlin, DFKI’s Language Technology and Multilinguality department and DFKI’s Intelligent Analytics for Massive Data group.

Latest News

Recent Publications

InterroLang: Exploring NLP Models and Datasets through Dialogue-based Explanations

While recently developed NLP explainability methods let us open the black box in various ways (Madsen et al., 2022), a missing ingredient in this endeavor is an interactive tool offering a conversational interface. Such a dialogue system can help users explore datasets and models with explanations in a contextualized manner, e.g. via clarification or follow-up questions, and through a natural language interface. We adapt the conversational explanation framework TalkToModel (Slack et al., 2022) to the NLP domain, add new NLP-specific operations such as free-text rationalization, and illustrate its generalizability on three NLP tasks (dialogue act classification, question answering, hate speech detection). To recognize user queries for explanations, we evaluate fine-tuned and few-shot prompting models and implement a novel adapter-based approach. We then conduct two user studies on (1) the perceived correctness and helpfulness of the dialogues, and (2) the simulatability, i.e. how objectively helpful dialogical explanations are for humans in figuring out the model’s predicted label when it’s not shown. We found rationalization and feature attribution were helpful in explaining the model behavior. Moreover, users could more reliably predict the model outcome based on an explanation dialogue rather than one-off explanations.

Projects

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BIFOLD
BIFOLD conducts foundational research in big data management and machine learning, as well as its intersection, to educate future talent, and create high-impact knowledge exchange. The Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD), has evolved in 2019 from the merger of two national Artificial Intelligence Competence Centers: the Berlin Big Data Center (BBDC) and the Berlin Center for Machine Learning (BZML). Embedded in the vibrant Berlin metropolitan area, BIFOLD provides an outstanding scientific environment and numerous collaboration opportunities for national and international researchers. BIFOLD offers a broad range of research topics as well as a platform for interdisciplinary research and knowledge exchange with the sciences and humanities, industry, startups and society. Within BIFOLD, DFKI SLT conducts research in Clinical AI, specifically addressing the task of Pharmacovigilance. Pharmacovigilance is concerned with the assessment and prevention of adverse drug reactions (ADR) in pharmaceutical products. As the level of medication is generally raising all over the world, the potential risk of unwanted side effects, such as ADRs, is constantly increasing. Patients exchange views in their own language as ‘experts in their own right,’ in social media and disease-specific forums. Our project addresses the detection and extraction of ADR from medical forums and social media across different languages using cross-lingual transfer learning in combination with external knowledge sources.
BIFOLD
BBDC2
In order to optimally prepare industry, science and the society in Germany and Europe for the global Big Data trend, highly coordinated activities in research, teaching, and technology transfer regarding the integration of data analysis methods and scalable data processing are required. To achieve this, the Berlin Big Data Center is pursuing the following seven objectives: 1) Pooling expertise in scalable data management, data analytics, and big data application 2) Conducting fundamental research to develop novel and automatically scalable technologies capable of performing ‘Deep Analysis’ of ‘Big Data’. 3) Developing an integrated, declarative, highly scalable open-source system that enables the specification, automatic optimization, parallelization and hardware adaptation, and fault-tolerant, efficient execution of advanced data analysis problems, using varying methods (e.g., drawn from machine learning, linear algebra, statistics and probability theory, computational linguistics, or signal processing), leveraging our work on Apache Flink 4) Transfering technology and know-how to support innovation in companies and startups. 5) Educating data scientists with respect to the five big data dimensions (i.e., applications, economic, legal, social, and technological) via leading educational programs. 6) Empowering people to leverage ‘Smart Data’, i.e., to discover newfound information based on their massive data sets. 7)Enabling the general public to conduct sound data-driven decision-making.
BBDC2

Datasets

The MultiTACRED dataset
MultiTACRED is a multilingual version of the large-scale TAC Relation Extraction Dataset. It covers 12 typologically diverse languages from 9 language families, and was created by machine-translating the instances of the original TACRED dataset and automatically projecting their entity annotations. For details of the original TACRED’s data collection and annotation process, see the Stanford paper. Translations are syntactically validated by checking the correctness of the XML tag markup. Any translations with an invalid tag structure, e.g. missing or invalid head or tail tag pairs, are discarded (on average, 2.3% of the instances). Languages covered are: Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Turkish. Intended use is supervised relation classification. Audience - researchers. The dataset will be released via the LDC (link will follow). Please see our ACL paper for full details. You can find the Github repo containing the translation and experiment code here https://github.com/DFKI-NLP/MultiTACRED.

Contact

  • Alt-Moabit 91c
    10559 Berlin
  • Enter Alt-Moabit 91c and take the elevator to Reception on Floor 4
  • 9:00 to 17:00 Monday to Friday