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
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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 ...
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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 ...
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Speech-to-Text for Swiss German
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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 ...
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AuSuM – Automatic Supply Chain Monitoring
The project implements an online service for companies to monitor suppliers for violations of environmental, social, or governance norms. To do so, a vast variety of sources, such as news outlets, is monitored using machine learning and natural language processing with near human-level accuracy. ...
Publications
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Mahlow, Cerstin; Ulasik, Malgorzata Anna; Tuggener, Don,
2022.
Reading and Writing.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-021-10234-6
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Benites, Fernando; Tuggener, Don; Hürlimann, Manuela; Cieliebak, Mark; Vogel, Manfred, eds.,
2021.
Proceedings of the Swiss Text Analytics Conference 2021.
Swiss Text Analytics Conference – SwissText 2021, Online, 14-16 June 2021.
CEUR Workshop Proceedings.
.
Available from: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2957/
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Tuggener, Don; Aghaebrahimian, Ahmad,
2021.
The Sentence End and Punctuation Prediction in NLG text (SEPP-NLG) shared task 2021 [paper].
In:
Proceedings of the Swiss Text Analytics Conference 2021.
Swiss Text Analytics Conference – SwissText 2021, Online, 14-16 June 2021.
CEUR Workshop Proceedings.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-23258
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Amirian, Mohammadreza; Tuggener, Lukas; Chavarriaga, Ricardo; Satyawan, Yvan Putra; Schilling, Frank-Peter; Schwenker, Friedhelm; Stadelmann, Thilo,
2021.
Two to trust : AutoML for safe modelling and interpretable deep learning for robustness [paper].
In:
Postproceedings of the 1st TAILOR Workshop on Trustworthy AI at ECAI 2020.
1st TAILOR Workshop on Trustworthy AI at ECAI 2020, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 29-30 August 2020.
Springer.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-22061
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2021.
Improving a semantic parser through user interaction.
Winterthur:
ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-22938