Research Areas
My research applies statistical methods to model and explore lexical-semantic phenomena, with a focus on the linguistic and cognitive plausibility of the computational approaches. Research topics include:- compositionality and meaning shifts of multi-word expressions across languages
(focuses: noun compounds, particle verbs, support-verb constructions), - abstractness, concreteness and metaphoricity,
- synchronic and diachronic ambiguity and (changes in) figurative language usage,
- selectional preferences and plausibility at the syntax-semantics interface,
- semantic associations, classifications and relations,
- creation of datasets with human judgements on meaning components and meaning relatedness,
- evaluation of corpus-based semantic knowledge,
- application of models to lexicography, machine translation, terminology extraction.
Research Group (aka as SemRel Team)
|  |
Projects and Grants
| since 07/2025 |
Principal Investigator, DFG Research Grant SCHU 2580/5-2 Project: Computational Models of Semantic Variation in Multi-Word Expressions across Speakers and Languages |
| since 06/2024 |
Principal Investigator, DFG Research Grant SCHU 2580/7-1 Project: MeTRapher: Learning to Translate Metaphors |
| 07/2022-08/2025 |
Principal Investigator, DFG Research Grant SCHU 2580/5-1 Project: Computational Models of the Emergence and Diachronic Change of Multi-Word Expression Meanings |
| since 03/2022 |
Principal Investigator, DFG Research Grant SCHU 2580/4-1 Project: Multimodal Dimensions and Computational Applications of Abstractness |
| 10/2015-06/2018 |
Principal Investigator, DFG SFB 732/D11 (taken over from Lonneke van der Plas) Collaborative Research Centre 732 "Incremental Specification in Context" Project: A Crosslingual Approach to the Analysis of Compound Nouns |
| 07/2014-06/2018 |
Principal Investigator, DFG SFB 732/D12 Collaborative Research Centre 732 "Incremental Specification in Context" Project: Sense Discrimination and Regular Meaning Shifts of German Particle Verbs |
| 07/2014-06/2018 |
Co-Director of the Integrated Research Training Group, DFG SFB 732/MGK Collaborative Research Centre 732 "Incremental Specification in Context" |
| 11/2011-02/2017 |
Principal Investigator, DFG Research Grant SCHU 2580/2 Project: Distributional Approaches to Semantic Relatedness |
| 10/2011-06/2014 |
Principal Investigator, DFG SFB 732/D6 (taken over from Sebastian Padó) Collaborative Research Centre 732 "Incremental Specification in Context" Project: Lexical-Semantic Factors in Event Interpretation |
| 10/2011-12/2016 |
DFG Heisenberg Fellowship SCHU 2580/1 |
| 08/2000-07/2003 |
DFG Doctoral Scholarship Graduate School 609 "Linguistic Representations and their Interpretation" |
Milestones
- Habilitation:
Theoretical Adequacy, Human Data and Classification Approaches in Modelling Word Properties, Word Relatedness and Word Classes
Philosophische Fakultät, Universität des Saarlandes, June 2009. [Habilitation homepage]
- PhD Thesis:
Experiments on the Automatic Induction of German Semantic Verb Classes
Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung, Universität Stuttgart, June 2003.
Published as AIMS Report 9(2). [PhD homepage]
Collaborations (current and past)
- Sabine
Arndt-Lappe (Universität Trier), Milena
Belosevic (Universität Bielefeld) and André
Blessing (Universität Stuttgart): modelling and evaluation of German name compounds
- Felix Bildhauer (Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim) and Roland Schäfer (Fachbereich Philosophie und Geisteswissenschaften, Freie Universität Berlin): evaluation of COW corpora
- Gemma Boleda Torrent (Department of Translation and Language Sciences,
Universitat Pompeu Fabra): automatic acquisition and evaluation of lexical classes
- Susanne Borgwaldt (Germanistisches Seminar, Universität Siegen): associations and compositionality of German compound nouns
- Miriam Butt and Daniela Briem (Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Konstanz): light verbs
- Katrin Erk (Linguistics Department, University of Texas at Austin) and Sebastian Padó (Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung, Universität Stuttgart): semantic verb classifications
- Alexander
Fraser (TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology, Heilbronn): integration of linguistic information into machine translation systems
- Diego
Frassinelli (Künstliche Intelligenz, Universität
Konstanz; and Centrum für Informations- und Sprachverarbeitung, Universität München): priming experiments on the directionality of complex verbs; contexts of abstract vs. concrete words
- Fritz Günther (Institut für Psychologie; Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin): noun compound compositionality estimates and models
- Adam Kilgarriff (Lexical Computing Ltd): German Sketch Engine
- Tibor Kiss and Antje Müller (Theoretische Linguistik/Computerlinguistik, Ruhr-Universität Bochum): preposition senses
- Steffen Koch (Institut für Visualisierung und Interaktive Systeme, Universität Stuttgart): visualisation of ambiguous words
- Alessandro
Lenci (Dipartimento di Linguistica, Universita di Pisa):
semantic relations, association norms, feature norms, and norms
of abstractness
- Timm Lichte, Rafael Ehren, Fabienne Cap and Heike Zinsmeister (Universitäten Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Uppsala): VerbCompoCor - German corpus with compositionality judgements for verb-dependent pairs
- Alissa Melinger (School of Psychology, University of Dundee) and Andrea Weber (Englisches Seminar, Universität Tübingen): collection and properties of association norms and their usage for NLP
- Eva Smolka (Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Konstanz): processing and representation of noun compounds and particle verbs
- Elke
Teich and Stefania
Degaetano-Ortlieb (Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken): quantitative diachronic models of compositionality
- Lonneke van
der Plas (Idiap Research Institute, Martigny), Prajit
Dhar (Universität Marburg) and Janis Pagel (Universiäät zu Köln): cross-lingual and distributional models of noun compounds
- Gabriella Vigliocco (University College London): abstract concepts and norms of abstractness