Natural Language Processing Group
“We combine foundational research with industrial applications to build new and innovative products and services, while at the same time exploring the necessary ethical and social boundaries.”
Fields of expertise
- Text analytics
- Dialogue systems
- Speech processing
The NLP research team develops technologies for the analysis, understanding and generation of speech and text. We combine methods from linguistics, natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence to enable natural language communication between humans and machines. In our research, we work on topics such as text classification (e.g. sentiment analysis), chatbots/dialogue systems, text summarization, speech-to-text, speaker diarization and natural language generation. The group particularly focuses on Swiss German speech and text processing.
Services
- Insight: keynotes, trainings
- AI consultancy: workshops, expert support, advice, technology assessment
- Research and development: small to large-scale collaborative projects, third party-funded research, student projects, commercially applicable prototypes
Team
Head of Research Group
Projects
-
Towards a Voice-Based Chatbot for Language Learners (ChaLL)
We take first steps towards developing ChaLL, a voice-based chatbot that provides language learners with opportunities to practice speaking in both focused and unfocused task-based conversations and receive feedback, free from the time constraints and pressures of the traditional classroom setting. ...
-
PRISM: Predicting Radicalization Events in Social Media User Timelines
The PRISM project focuses on detecting radicalization events in Social Media networks. Overall, we are interested in unveiling the mechanics that lead to the event of extremist ideology being transferred and incorporated into a social media user’s world view. Specifically, the proposed project aims to identify ...
-
DOSSMA – Detection of Suspicious Social Media Activities
The DOSSMA project will investigate suspicious and malicious behaviour on social media platforms. In a first phase, we will compile an extensive survey report on the areas that are currently being researched, including the respective state-of-the-art, existing solutions and initiatives. This report will serve as a ...
-
Speech-to-Text for Swiss German
-
Virtual Kids - Virtual characters to improve the quality of child interrogations
If children are questioned in preliminary proceedings about their own experiences or observations relevant to criminal law, it depends decisively on the quality of the questioning whether their statements can be used in criminal proceedings or whether decisions can be made on this basis and appropriate consequences ...
Publications
-
von Däniken, Pius; Deriu, Jan Milan; Agirre, Eneko; Brunner, Ursin; Cieliebak, Mark; Stockinger, Kurt,
2022.
Improving NL-to-Query systems through re-ranking of semantic hypothesis [paper].
In:
5th International Conference on Natural Language and Speech Processing (ICNLSP), online, 16-17 December 2022.
Winterthur:
ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-26147
-
Wertz, Lukas; Bogojeska, Jasmina; Mirylenka, Katsiaryna; Kuhn, Jonas,
2022.
In:
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers).
2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (AACL-IJCNLP), online, 20-23 November 2022.
Association for Computational Linguistics.
pp. 366-372.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-26577
-
Hürlimann, Manuela; Galbier, Jolanda; Cieliebak, Mark,
2022.
Speech-to-text technology for hard-of-hearing people.
ERCIM News.
(130), pp. 15-16.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-27071
-
Plüss, Michel; Hürlimann, Manuela; Cuny, Marc; Stöckli, Alla; Kapotis, Nikolaos; Hartmann, Julia; Ulasik, Malgorzata Anna; Scheller, Christian; Schraner, Yanick; Jain, Amit; Deriu, Jan Milan; Cieliebak, Mark; Vogel, Manfred,
2022.
SDS-200 : a Swiss German speech to Standard German text corpus [paper].
In:
Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022).
13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), Marseille, France, 20-25 June 2022.
European Language Resources Association.
pp. 3250-3256.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-26131
-
Deriu, Jan Milan; Tuggener, Don; von Däniken, Pius; Cieliebak, Mark,
2022.
Probing the robustness of trained metrics for conversational dialogue systems [paper].
In:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2022), Dublin, Ireland, 22-27 May 2022.
Association for Computational Linguistics.
pp. 750-761.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.acl-short.85