Frank Fischer


2023

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Japan’s Answer to Mozart”: Automatic Detection of Generalized Patterns of Vossian Antonomasia
Michel Schwab | Robert Jäschke | Frank Fischer
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language and Speech Processing (ICNLSP 2023)

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“Who is the Madonna of Italian-American Literature?”: Target Entity Extraction and Analysis of Vossian Antonomasia
Michel Schwab | Robert Jäschke | Frank Fischer
Proceedings of the 7th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature

In this paper, we present approaches for the automated extraction and disambiguation of a part of the stylistic device Vossian Antonomasia (VA), namely the target entity that is described by the expression. We model the problem as a coreference resolution task and a question answering task and also combine both tasks. To tackle these tasks, we utilize state-of-the-art models in these areas. In addition, we visualize the connection between the source and target entities of VA in a web demo to get a deeper understanding of the interaction of entities used in VA expressions.

2022

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“Der Frank Sinatra der Wettervorhersage”: Cross-Lingual Vossian Antonomasia Extraction
Michel Schwab | Robert Jäschke | Frank Fischer
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Natural Language and Speech Processing (ICNLSP 2022)

2019

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Analysis of Automatic Annotation Suggestions for Hard Discourse-Level Tasks in Expert Domains
Claudia Schulz | Christian M. Meyer | Jan Kiesewetter | Michael Sailer | Elisabeth Bauer | Martin R. Fischer | Frank Fischer | Iryna Gurevych
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Many complex discourse-level tasks can aid domain experts in their work but require costly expert annotations for data creation. To speed up and ease annotations, we investigate the viability of automatically generated annotation suggestions for such tasks. As an example, we choose a task that is particularly hard for both humans and machines: the segmentation and classification of epistemic activities in diagnostic reasoning texts. We create and publish a new dataset covering two domains and carefully analyse the suggested annotations. We find that suggestions have positive effects on annotation speed and performance, while not introducing noteworthy biases. Envisioning suggestion models that improve with newly annotated texts, we contrast methods for continuous model adjustment and suggest the most effective setup for suggestions in future expert tasks.

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“A Buster Keaton of Linguistics”: First Automated Approaches for the Extraction of Vossian Antonomasia
Michel Schwab | Robert Jäschke | Frank Fischer | Jannik Strötgen
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Attributing a particular property to a person by naming another person, who is typically wellknown for the respective property, is called a Vossian Antonomasia (VA). This subtpye of metonymy, which overlaps with metaphor, has a specific syntax and is especially frequent in journalistic texts. While identifying Vossian Antonomasia is of particular interest in the study of stylistics, it is also a source of errors in relation and fact extraction as an explicitly mentioned entity occurs only metaphorically and should not be associated with respective contexts. Despite rather simple syntactic variations, the automatic extraction of VA was never addressed as yet since it requires a deeper semantic understanding of mentioned entities and underlying relations. In this paper, we propose a first method for the extraction of VAs that works completely automatically. Our approaches use named entity recognition, distant supervision based on Wikidata, and a bi-directional LSTM for postprocessing. The evaluation on 1.8 million articles of the New York Times corpus shows that our approach significantly outperforms the only existing semi-automatic approach for VA identification by more than 30 percentage points in precision.

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FAMULUS: Interactive Annotation and Feedback Generation for Teaching Diagnostic Reasoning
Jonas Pfeiffer | Christian M. Meyer | Claudia Schulz | Jan Kiesewetter | Jan Zottmann | Michael Sailer | Elisabeth Bauer | Frank Fischer | Martin R. Fischer | Iryna Gurevych
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP): System Demonstrations

Our proposed system FAMULUS helps students learn to diagnose based on automatic feedback in virtual patient simulations, and it supports instructors in labeling training data. Diagnosing is an exceptionally difficult skill to obtain but vital for many different professions (e.g., medical doctors, teachers). Previous case simulation systems are limited to multiple-choice questions and thus cannot give constructive individualized feedback on a student’s diagnostic reasoning process. Given initially only limited data, we leverage a (replaceable) NLP model to both support experts in their further data annotation with automatic suggestions, and we provide automatic feedback for students. We argue that because the central model consistently improves, our interactive approach encourages both students and instructors to recurrently use the tool, and thus accelerate the speed of data creation and annotation. We show results from two user studies on diagnostic reasoning in medicine and teacher education and outline how our system can be extended to further use cases.

2015

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Keynote: The Interplay of Discussion, Cognition and Instruction in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Environments
Frank Fischer
Proceedings of the 16th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue