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

CoXQL: A Dataset for Parsing Explanation Requests in Conversational XAI Systems

Conversational explainable artificial intelligence (ConvXAI) systems based on large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant interest from the research community in natural language processing (NLP) and human-computer interaction (HCI). Such systems can provide answers to user questions about explanations in dialogues, have the potential to enhance users' comprehension and offer more information about the decision-making and generation processes of LLMs. Currently available ConvXAI systems are based on intent recognition rather than free chat, as this has been found to be more precise and reliable in identifying users' intentions. However, the recognition of intents still presents a challenge in the case of ConvXAI, since little training data exist and the domain is highly specific, as there is a broad range of XAI methods to map requests onto. In order to bridge this gap, we present CoXQL, the first dataset for user intent recognition in ConvXAI, covering 31 intents, seven of which require filling multiple slots. Subsequently, we enhance an existing parsing approach by incorporating template validations, and conduct an evaluation of several LLMs on CoXQL using different parsing strategies. We conclude that the improved parsing approach (MP+) surpasses the performance of previous approaches. We also discover that intents with multiple slots remain highly challenging for LLMs.

Projects

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TRAILS - Trustworthy and Inclusive Machines
Natural language processing (NLP) has demonstrated impressive performance in some human tasks. To achieve such performance, current neural models need to be pre-trained on huge amounts of raw text data. This dependence on uncurated data has at least four indirect and unintended consequences: 1) Uncurated data tends to be linguistically and culturally non-diverse due to the statistical dominance of major languages and dialects in online texts (English vs. North Frisian, US English vs. UK English, etc.). 2) Pre-trained neural models such as the ubiquitous pre-trained language models (PLM) reproduce the features present in the data, including human biases. 3) Rare phenomena (or languages) in the ‘long tail’ are often not sufficiently taken into account in model evaluation, leading to an underestimation of model performance, especially in real-world application scenarios. 4) The focus on achieving state-of-the-art results through the use of transfer learning with giant PLMs such as GPT4 or mT5 often underestimates alternative methods that are more accessible, efficient and sustainable. As inclusion and trust are undermined by these problems, in TRAILS we focus on three main research directions to address such problems: (i) inclusion of underrepresented languages and cultures through multilingual and culturally sensitive NLP, (ii) robustness and fairness with respect to long-tail phenomena and classes and ‘trustworthy content’, and (iii) robust and efficient NLP models that enable training and deployment of models for (i) and (ii). We also partially address economic inequality by aiming for more efficient models (objective (iii)), which directly translates into a lower resource/cost footprint.
TRAILS - Trustworthy and Inclusive Machines
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