About Us

Universitätsstr. 27 – PRG / Gebäude 5, Raum A 125 (1. Etage), 58097 Hagen

Welcome to the Language Technology Lab!

We conduct research in the field of language technology and natural language processing. We are especially interested in analyzing and processing non-standard, error-prone language as found in social media and learner language. Consequently, our research can be divided into three main areas:

Educational NLP

  • Short answer scoring
  • Essay scoring
  • Vocabulary acquisition
  • Spelling and grammar correction
  • Exercise generation
  • Exercise difficulty prediction

Social Media Analysis

  • Sentiment and stance detection
  • Argument mining
  • Detection of hate speech and abusive language
  • Semantic meaning relations

NLP Engineering

  • Robustness of tools
  • Domain adaption
  • Large-scale semantic processing

We are committed to reproducible and replicable research. We generally make all research software publicly available.

News

May 11, 2022
Three Papers accepted at the 17th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications
Three papers have been accepted at the BEA 2022 workshop:
  • Marie Bexte, Andrea Horbach and Torsten Zesch: Similarity-Based Content Scoring - How to Make S-BERT Keep Up With BERT
  • Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Leska Schwarz, Andrea Horbach and Torsten Zesch: ‘Meet me at the ribary’ - Acceptability of spelling variants in free-text answers to listening comprehension prompts
  • Yuning Ding, Marie Bexte and Andrea Horbach: Don’t Drop the Topic - The Role of the Prompt in Argument Identification in Student Writing
Apr 11, 2022
Paper accepted at the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
The following paper has been accepted at the 2022 LREC conference:
  • Marie Bexte, Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Andrea Horbach and Torsten Zesch: LeSpell - A Multi-Lingual Benchmark Corpus of Spelling Errors to Develop Spellchecking Methods for Learner Language
Dec 21, 2021
Ronja Laarmann-Quante receives GdF Dissertation award
Ronja Laarmann-Quante receives the GdF Award for outstanding interdisciplinary dissertations for her work on “Prediction of Spelling Errors in Freely-Written Texts of German Primary School Children”. The award is sponsored by the “Gesellschaft der Freunde der Ruhr-Universität Bochum e. V.”. Congratulations, Ronja!
Sep 15, 2021
Marie Bexte wins GSCL Award for best Student Thesis
Marie Bexte won the GSCL Award for the best Student Thesis for her master thesis “Combined Analysis of Image and Text Using Visio-Linguistic Neural Models - A Case Study on Robustness Within an Educational Scoring Task”. The price was awarded at this year’s KONVENS in Düsseldorf. Congratulations, Marie!
Jul 12, 2021
Ronja Laarmann-Quante receives KlarText Award
Ronja Laarmann-Quante receives the KlarText Award for science communication by the Klaus Tschira foundation. Every year, young researchers across Germany are invited to present the key findings of their dissertation in an easy to understand manner to the general public. Ronja received this year’s award in the computer science category for the article “Schwere Radieschencreme” about the automatic classification of spelling errors in texts by elementary school students. Congratulations, Ronja!