Curriculum Vitae

Work

 
 
 
 
 
Research Associate
Institute of German Sign Language
Hamburg University
March 2019 – Present Hamburg, Germany
Project: DGS-Korpus
Tasks: Use of machine learning and other NLP techniques to enable automatic corpus enhancements, offer assistive user functions and to perform quantitative corpus analysis.
 
 
 
 
 
Software Engineering Intern
Google Switzerland
May 2016 – August 2016 Zürich, Switzerland
Group: Privacy Infrastructure
Task: Sentiment Analysis and Linguistic Processing.
 
 
 
 
 
Doctoral Researcher
Language and Signal Processing Group
Saarland University
October 2014 – January 2019 Saarbrücken, Germany
Project: Resource- and data-intensive methods for robust fine-grained sentiment analysis.
Tasks: Data-driven sentiment analysis on the phrase level, focus on polarity shifting.
 
 
 
 
 
Doctoral Researcher
Language and Signal Processing Group
Saarland University
April 2013 – March 2015 Saarbrücken, Germany
Project: AcListant
Tasks: Grammar Design, FST-based Labeling Techniques, Annotation Tool Development, Language Modelling and Information Processing in ASR.
 
 
 
 
 
Student Research Assistant
DFKI - German Research Center for AI
August 2010 – March 2012 Saarbrücken, Germany
Project: THESEUS
Tasks: Development in Java, Ontology Processing.
 
 
 
 
 
Student Research Assistant
DFKI - German Research Center for AI
August 2008 – December 2009 Saarbrücken, Germany
Project: AMIDA
Tasks: Development in Java, Natural Language Generation.

Education

 
 
 
 
 
Doctor of Philosophy: Computational Linguistics
Department of Language Science and Technology
Saarland University
November 2013 – August 2019 Saarbrücken, Germany
Thesis: Sentiment Polarity Shifters: Creating Lexical Resources through Manual Annotation and Bootstrapped Machine Learning
Research Group: Language and Signal Processing (LSV)
Supervisors: Prof. Dietrich Klakow, Michael Wiegand
 
 
 
 
 
Master of Science: Language Science and Technology
Department of Computational Linguistics
Saarland University
April 2011 – November 2013 Saarbrücken, Germany
Thesis: Metaphor Detection through Term Frequency
Supervisor: Prof. Dietrich Klakow
 
 
 
 
 
Bachelor of Science: Computational Linguistics
Department of Computational Linguistics
Saarland University
October 2007 – March 2011 Saarbrücken, Germany
Thesis: Investigations on State Space Clustering in Reinforcement Learning
Supervisor: Prof. Dietrich Klakow
 
 
 
 
 
Visiting Researcher
Information Sciences Institute
University of Southern California
April 2012 – September 2012 Los Angeles, USA
Research Topic: Metaphor Detection in the Governance Domain.
Supervisor: Prof. Eduard Hovy
 
 
 
 
 
Erasmus Student Exchange
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
September 2009 – May 2010 Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

Teaching

 
 
 
 
 
Hamburg Summer School on Language Documentation and Corpus Technology
Lectures with Tutorial
October 2019 – October 2019 Hamburg University

Lecture 1: Data Visualisation - Using Graphs and more to Evaluate and Present your Data
Co-taught with Daniel Jettka and Thomas Hanke

Lecture 2: OpenPose for Linguists
Co-taught with Maren Brumm and Thomas Hanke

 
 
 
 
 
Introduction to Python Programming
Lectures
Co-taught with Stefan Thater
October 2015 – February 2016 Saarland University
 
 
 
 
 
Sentiment Analysis
Bachelor Seminar
Co-taught with Michael Wiegand
April 2015 – July 2015 Saarland University
 
 
 
 
 
Opinion Holder and Target Extraction for German,
Software Project
Co-taught with Michael Wiegand
October 2014 – February 2015 Saarland University

Extra­curricular

 
 
 
 
 
Organising Committee
sign-lang@LREC Workshop Series on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages
October 2021 – Present Universität Hamburg
Organiser of the sign-lang@LREC workshop series. My main roles are technical implementation of the hybrid workshop solutions, generation of the proceedings and support during on-stage presentations.
 
 
 
 
 
Chairman
Alumni Network “Friends of LST”
May 2017 – November 2019 Saarland University
May 2018 – November 2019: First Chairman
May 2017 – May 2018: Second Chairman

“Friends of LST” is the alumni network of the freshly merged computational linguistics and translation department. We organise networking events for former and current members, supports social events for department, etc.
 
 
 
 
 
Committee Member
Department 25th Anniversary Celebration
January 2017 – October 2017 Saarland University
For the 25th anniversary of the department of computational linguistics and phonetics we organised a celebration to which all current and former members of the department were invited. I was in charge of handling the invitations, which involved compiling the list of invitees, determining their current contact information, managing RSVPs and handling any other correspondence.
 
 
 
 
 
Team Member
Bachelorpool CL
January 2013 – December 2015 Saarland University

The outreach team Bachelorpool organises events to inform the public about computational linguistics. Among the events we regularly participate in are:

  • Girl’s Day: Introducing girls aged 10–16 to STEM subjects.
  • UniCamp: 5-day event for girls aged 12–15 comprised of half-day STEM workshops.
  • Open House: Presentations and demonstrations for the general public.
 
 
 
 
 
Council Member
Student Council Computational Linguistics
January 2013 – December 2015 Universität des Saarlandes

The student council (Fachschaftsrat) provides a variety of services to the department of computational linguistics:

  • Introductory events for new students
  • Individual advice and support
  • Departmental social activities, such as breakfast buffets and the summer BBQ
  • Student-lecturer mediation
  • Acquisitions for the student body, such as a study room fitted with lockers and leather sofas

Summer Schools

European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI)
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain August 2015
Lisbon Machine Learning School (LxMLS)
Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal July 2014

Awards

Innovation award: Landmarks in the Land of Ideas
Initiative Germany – Land of Ideas. June 2017
Awarded to the department of computational linguistics at Saarland University for the AcListant project, of which I was a member as part of my doctoral studies. The project was honoured for its contributions to improving the working conditions of air traffic controllers.
UdS-Mobil/PROMOS research stipend
German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) April 2012 – September 2012
ERASMUS exchange stipend
European Union. September 2009 – May 2010