I am incredibly happy to share that our paper "CompoST: A Benchmark for Analyzing the Ability of LLMs To Compositionally Interpret Questions in a QALD Setting" has been accepted as a research track paper at the International Semantic Web Conference @iswc_conf! Huge thanks to my co-authors Raoul Schubert and Philipp Cimiano! Stay tuned for the paper and see you all in Japan!

A huge thanks to everyone who made this week such a unique, memorable experience! And, if you are Master's/PhD student or PostDoc, I cannot recommend too much to apply for the next iteration of #isws !

- worked in a research task force on building a reliable LLM-based metadata enrichment pipeline for cultural heritage objects (special thanks to our tutor Valentina Presutti and our whole team), as well as writing a corresponding white paper and presenting our results in the final session
- got to know and discussed with so many fascinating people
- and listened to keynotes and tutorials of well-known researchers such as Frank van Harmelen, Natasha Noy and Enrico Motta

The #ISWS2025 experience really managed to combine lots of fun activities and challenges (that we took an oath to keep secret 🤫), working with leading figures of the Semantic Web field as well as intense networking in a unique, wonderful way! It felt like a month worth of program items and activities had been compressed to one magnificent piece of art.
During the last week, among many other things, I
- summarized the motivation of my work in a 45s "Minute Madness" session

What a week! I just had the incredible opportunity to attend the International Semantic Web Research Summer School 2025 @isws in Bertinoro, Italy. I hoped for an intense week filled with inspiring keynotes, interesting people to talk with and opportunities to present my work on Question Answering over Linked Data and compositionality - and I got so much more than "just" that!

The objective of this study was to evaluate to what extent state-of-the-art large language models can appropriately summarize posts shared by patients in web-based forums and health communities. Specifically, the goal was to compare the performance of different language models and prompting strategies on the task of summarizing documents reflecting the experiences of individual patients.

Social media is acknowledged by regulatory bodies (e.g., the Food and Drug Administration) as an important source of patient experience data to learn about patients’ unmet needs, priorities, and preferences. However, current methods rely either on manual analysis and do not scale, or on automatic processing, yielding mainly quantitative insights. Methods that can automatically summarize texts and yield qualitative insights at scale are missing.

🚀 New paper! 🚀

I am happy to announce our paper "Summarizing Online Patient Conversations Using Generative Language Models: Experimental and Comparative Study," which has just been published in JMIR Medical Informatics!

🎓 Authors: Rakhi Asokkumar Subjagouri Nair, Matthias Hartung, Philipp Heinisch, Janik Jaskolski, Cornelius Starke-Knäusel, Susana Veríssimo, David M. Schmidt, Philipp Cimiano

🔗 Paper: https://doi.org/10.2196/62909

We currently have two fully-funded open PhD positions in our group with a focus on #NLProc, #InformationExtraction and #TextGeneration. I can really recommend both the group as well as Philipp Cimiano as a supervisor, so take this opportunity!

NLP/Text Generation
EN: https://uni-bielefeld.hr4you.org/job/view/4054
DE: https://uni-bielefeld.hr4you.org/job/view/4053

NLP/Information Extraction
EN: https://uni-bielefeld.hr4you.org/job/view/4059
DE: https://uni-bielefeld.hr4you.org/job/view/4057

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact me or Philipp directly!

🚀 We are #hiring! Are you interested in Natural Language Processing, Text Generation or Information Extraction and want to pursue a PhD?

Then you now have the chance to become a part of the Semantic Computing Group at Bielefeld University!

Application Deadline: 20.03.2025

📣 Spring School 2025: Innovating AI Evaluation – Beyond Accuracy and Precision

📅 March 26–28
📍 CITEC, Bielefeld University

Join us for an exciting line-up of tutorials, discussions, and networking opportunities! 🎓

➡️More info & program: https://www.sail.nrw/springschool/

For selecting clinical trials to be compared in systematic reviews, it is important that they measure the same outcomes. As there is a wide variety of outcomes, and it is difficult to standardize them for comparing clinical trials containing them, this is a challenge. To address this, we utilized an annotated dataset about glaucoma and type 2 diabetes. We then developed a tool that provides an overview of the annotated clinical trial information and enables users to group them by outcomes.

🚀 New month, new paper! 🚀

Our paper "Open challenges for the automatic synthesis of clinical trials" has been published at BMC Research Notes!

🎓 Authors: Olivia Sánchez Graillet, David M. Schmidt, Christian Kullik and Philipp Cimiano

🔗 Paper: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13104-025-07121-6

💡 Interested? Try it yourself!

Tool: https://ag-sc.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/ctvis/

In this work, we experimentally investigate the influence of grammar-constrained decoding as well as pointer generators on the performance of a domain-specific information extraction system. For this, we consider fine-tuned encoder-decoder models, Longformer and Flan-T5 in particular, and experimentally investigate whether the addition of grammar-constrained decoding and pointer generators improve information extraction results.

🚀 New year, new paper! 🚀

Proud to share our paper "Grammar-constrained decoding for structured information extraction with fine-tuned generative models applied to clinical trial abstracts" has been published at Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence!

🔗 https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2024.1406857

💡 Interested? Try it yourself!

Zenodo artifact: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14615186

GitHub repository: https://github.com/ag-sc/clinical-trial-ie-gcd

🧑‍💻 Additionally, you can find the code and data if our approach on Zenodo, GitHub and DockerHub:
Zenodo artifact: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12610054
GitHub repository: https://github.com/ag-sc/neodudes/
DockerHub image: https://hub.docker.com/r/dvs23/neodudes

At the main conference, I presented our paper "Lexicalization Is All You Need: Examining the Impact of Lexical Knowledge in a Compositional QALD System" as well as an accompanying poster and demo illustrating the strengths of our lexicon-based, compositional question answering approach.

💡 Missed the talk or want to know more? You can find our paper here:
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-77792-9_7
Preprint: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2411.03906

It has been an exciting week at EKAW 2024 @ekawconference in Amsterdam! Lots of interesting talks, inspiring discussions and entertaining social events! #ekaw2024

💬 Additionally to the paper presentation @ekawconference - International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, we will also take part in the poster session. So drop by if you want to discuss future avenues of question answering research!

🚨 Thrilled to announce a new paper!

📝 Title: Lexicalization Is All You Need: Examining the Impact of Lexical Knowledge in a Compositional QALD System
👩‍🎓👨‍🎓 Authors: David M. Schmidt, Mohammad Fazleh Elahi, Philipp Cimiano
🔗 Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.03906
Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-77792-9_7

💡 Interested? Try it yourself!

Zenodo artifact: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12610054
GitHub repository: https://github.com/ag-sc/neodudes/
DockerHub image: https://hub.docker.com/r/dvs23/neodudes