Tim Fischer


2024

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VIDA: The Visual Incel Data Archive. A Theory-oriented Annotated Dataset To Enhance Hate Detection Through Visual Culture
Selenia Anastasi | Florian Schneider | Chris Biemann | Tim Fischer
Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH 2024)

Images increasingly constitute a larger portion of internet content, encoding even more complex meanings. Recent studies have highlight the pivotal role of visual communication in the spread of extremist content, particularly that associated with right-wing political ideologies. However, the capability of machine learning systems to recognize such meanings, sometimes implicit, remains limited. To enable future research in this area, we introduce and release VIDA, the Visual Incel Data Archive, a multimodal dataset comprising visual material and internet memes collected from two main Incel communities (Italian and Anglophone) known for their extremist misogynistic content. Following the analytical framework of Shifman (2014), we propose a new taxonomy for annotation across three main levels of analysis: content, form, and stance (hate). This allows for the association of images with fine-grained contextual information that help to identify the presence of offensiveness and a broader set of cultural references, enhancing the understanding of more nuanced aspects in visual communication. In this work we present a statistical analysis of the annotated dataset as well as discuss annotation examples and future line of research.

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Concept Over Time Analysis: Unveiling Temporal Patterns for Qualitative Data Analysis
Tim Fischer | Florian Schneider | Robert Geislinger | Florian Helfer | Gertraud Koch | Chris Biemann
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)

In this system demonstration paper, we present the Concept Over Time Analysis extension for the Discourse Analysis Tool Suite.The proposed tool empowers users to define, refine, and visualize their concepts of interest within an interactive interface. Adhering to the Human-in-the-loop paradigm, users can give feedback through sentence annotations. Utilizing few-shot sentence classification, the system employs Sentence Transformers to compute representations of sentences and concepts. Through an iterative process involving semantic similarity searches, sentence annotation, and fine-tuning with contrastive data, the model continuously refines, providing users with enhanced analysis outcomes. The final output is a timeline visualization of sentences classified to concepts. Especially suited for the Digital Humanities, Concept Over Time Analysis serves as a valuable tool for qualitative data analysis within extensive datasets. The chronological overview of concepts enables researchers to uncover patterns, trends, and shifts in discourse over time.

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AnnoPlot: Interactive Visualizations of Text Annotations
Elisabeth Fittschen | Tim Fischer | Daniel Brühl | Julia Spahr | Yuliia Lysa | Phuoc Thang Le
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

This paper presents AnnoPlot, a web application designed to analyze, manage, and visualize annotated text data.Users can configure projects, upload datasets, and explore their data through interactive visualization of span annotations with scatter plots, clusters, and statistics. AnnoPlot supports various transformer models to compute high-dimensional embeddings of text annotations and utilizes dimensionality reduction algorithms to offer users a novel 2D view of their datasets.A dynamic approach to dimensionality reduction allows users to adjust visualizations in real-time, facilitating category reorganization and error identification. The proposed application is open-source, promoting transparency and user control.Especially suited for the Digital Humanities, AnnoPlot offers a novel solution to address challenges in dynamic annotation datasets, empowering users to enhance data integrity and adapt to evolving categorizations.

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Extending the Discourse Analysis Tool Suite with Whiteboards for Visual Qualitative Analysis
Tim Fischer | Florian Schneider | Fynn Petersen-Frey | Anja Silvia Mollah Haque | Isabel Eiser | Gertraud Koch | Chris Biemann
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

In this system demonstration paper, we describe the Whiteboards extension for an existing web-based platform for digital qualitative discourse analysis. Whiteboards comprise interactive graph-based interfaces to organize and manipulate objects, which can be qualitative research data, such as documents, images, etc., and analyses of these research data, such as annotations, tags, and code structures. The proposed extension offers a customizable view of the material and a wide range of actions that enable new ways of interacting and working with such resources. We show that the visualizations facilitate various use cases of qualitative data analysis, including reflection of the research process through sampling maps, creation of actor networks, and refining code taxonomies.

2023

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The D-WISE Tool Suite: Multi-Modal Machine-Learning-Powered Tools Supporting and Enhancing Digital Discourse Analysis
Florian Schneider | Tim Fischer | Fynn Petersen-Frey | Isabel Eiser | Gertraud Koch | Chris Biemann
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)

This work introduces the D-WISE Tool Suite (DWTS), a novel working environment for digital qualitative discourse analysis in the Digital Humanities (DH). The DWTS addresses limitations of current DH tools induced by the ever-increasing amount of heterogeneous, unstructured, and multi-modal data in which the discourses of contemporary societies are encoded. To provide meaningful insights from such data, our system leverages and combines state-of-the-art machine learning technologies from Natural Language Processing and Com-puter Vision. Further, the DWTS is conceived and developed by an interdisciplinary team ofcultural anthropologists and computer scientists to ensure the tool’s usability for modernDH research. Central features of the DWTS are: a) import of multi-modal data like text, image, audio, and video b) preprocessing pipelines for automatic annotations c) lexical and semantic search of documents d) manual span, bounding box, time-span, and frame annotations e) documentation of the research process.

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From Qualitative to Quantitative Research: Semi-Automatic Annotation Scaling in the Digital Humanities
Fynn Petersen-Frey | Tim Fischer | Florian Schneider | Isabel Eiser | Gertraud Koch | Chris Biemann
Proceedings of the 19th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2023)

2022

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Measuring Faithfulness of Abstractive Summaries
Tim Fischer | Steffen Remus | Chris Biemann
Proceedings of the 18th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2022)

2019

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LT Expertfinder: An Evaluation Framework for Expert Finding Methods
Tim Fischer | Steffen Remus | Chris Biemann
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Demonstrations)

Expert finding is the task of ranking persons for a predefined topic or search query. Finding experts for a specified area is an important task and has attracted much attention in the information retrieval community. Most approaches for this task are evaluated in a supervised fashion, which depend on predefined topics of interest as well as gold standard expert rankings. Famous representatives of such datasets are enriched versions of DBLP provided by the ArnetMiner projet or the W3C Corpus of TREC. However, manually ranking experts can be considered highly subjective and detailed rankings are hardly distinguishable. Evaluating these datasets does not necessarily guarantee a good or bad performance of the system. Particularly for dynamic systems, where topics are not predefined but formulated as a search query, we believe a more informative approach is to perform user studies for directly comparing different methods in the same view. In order to accomplish this in a user-friendly way, we present the LT Expert Finder web-application, which is equipped with various query-based expert finding methods that can be easily extended, a detailed expert profile view, detailed evidence in form of relevant documents and statistics, and an evaluation component that allows the qualitative comparison between different rankings.