Technical devices are getting more versatile and sophisticated all the time. To make their use more intuitive, the NLP group develops software facilitating the multimodal dialogue between users and machines, applying both statistical and symbolic methods. The group's research focus lies on the semantics and pragmatics of discourse.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

We are very happy to announce that Angela Fahrni's system basically crushed the competition (according to most of the evaluation metrics) in the NTCIR-9 Cross-lingual Link Discovery Task!

We welcome Katja Markert as a Humboldt scholar in our group. She will work together with Yufang Hou and Michael Strube on bridging resolution.

Sebastian Padó, Stefan Riezler, Anette Frank and Michael Strube received funding for a Promotionskolleg entitled Coherence in Language Processing: Semantics Beyond the Sentence. Five PhD scholarships are available here (Application deadline: July 31st, 2011).

Simone Paolo Ponzetto and Michael have an invited presentation at the best paper track at IJCAI '11.

The last paper got accepted! Simone Paolo Ponzetto and Michael finished up their work on extracting knowledge from Wikipedia with a publication in Artificial Intelligence: Taxonomy Induction Based on a Collaboratively Built Knowledge Repository.

Michael and Cai have participated in the CoNLL shared task: Modeling Unrestricted Coreference in OntoNotes. Cai was pleased that their system -- COPA -- performed quite well (it came in second in the open track), but they are also mad they did not win, so they plan to be back with a vengeance next year!

Alex Judea, Vivi and Michael have a demo paper at IJCNLP.

Less new news here.