Jobs & News

01Mar

See you on Teams, Soumya!

Last week we had a team lunch to say goodbye to Soumya, who will be working from India in the future. We had a delicious lunch at AuthenTikka and enjoyed getting together in real life.

10Feb

Parser for shipping client

In order to facilitate the settlement process between the harbour master and shipping companies, LangTec, with expert knowledge in NLP, develops a tailor-made parser for documents with commercial, technical, legal and safety information on tankers for our shipping client in South-East Asia. The processed documents include standardised questionnaires “Questionnaire 88” and harbour timesheets in a number of different input formats such as text, images or webpages. LangTec’s solution comprises information ingestion, parsing, analysis, normalisation and disambiguation of process-relevant data and is offered as a REST-compliant web service.

21Jan

Extension and optimization of the annotation and analysis software CATMA

The annotation and analysis software CATMA is one of the core components of the BMBF-funded research project forTEXT at the TU Darmstadt. forTEXT brings major extensions and optimizations for the git/Gitlab based backend of CATMA. This includes a simplified layout of CATMA’s underlying git-projects and their file and folder structure, an efficient indexing of text and annotations with regards to memory consumption and performance and a new and easy collaboration mode for the analysis of common annotation results without the need of lengthy merge processes.

LangTec supports this development with the expertise in software engineering, Java and graph-based data structures.

20Dec

A harbour cruise for Christmas

Hamburg was at its best self with the most excited winds and waves for our Christmas party and guess where we kicked-off the party!? We met at the Elbe river dock and we headed out for our journey on a harbour cruise along the river! The river ride was extremely adventurous with huge waves rocking our boat and winds fluttering the boat-roof, added on top of it was an engaging live commentary by a very humorous sailor.

After finally setting our foot on land, we dined at Philipps restaurant and tried some authentic German-style Christmas dishes. We had a very pleasant dinner with face-to-face conversations without a screen separating us! We really had a very successful evening with delicious food, drinks, splendid ambience and of course, light-hearted talks. 🙂

24Nov

LangTec for visit at Macromedia University

As part of the cooperation with Prof. Dr. Hestermann in the research project Police Press Releases, two of our computational linguists visited Marcomedia University Hamburg with the aim of introducing journalism students to the field of semantic text analysis. The automated processing of large amounts of data offers great potential for journalistic projects, as explained in the lecture using the research project of police press reports as an example: In order to be able to make statements about the origin of persons mentioned in police press reports, the distinction between suspects and victims is central to the quality of the statements. In implementing this distinction, the students actively support LangTec by annotating data sets that are later used to train the machine classification model. The seminar concludes with a lively discussion about difficulties and requirements for high-quality annotations and future uses of semantic text analysis.

The report of the Marcomedia University can be read here.

01Oct

Extension for ADAPI

Our research project ADAPI, which we are working on with the Fraunhofer Institutes IDMT and IBMT, has been granted an extension until May 2022. We are looking forward to the first results of our tests of ADAPI in the clinic.

21Sep

Expert Interview for the Ministry of Economics

The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs sponsors long-running programs to promote the digitalization of the German economy (Measurement of the Digitalisation of the German Economy). They focus particularly on Artificial Intelligence as an enabler of economic growth; besides workshops and publicity initiatives, this also involves conducting in-depth interviews with practitioners in the field.

Every year investigates a different aspect of digitalization, and 2021 is the year of NLP. LangTec has been selected as a prominent example and invited to contribute the practitioner’s perspective in a semi-structured multi-hour interview. The Q&A process ranged over the topics of typical application areas, achievable levels of quality, requirements on IT platforms, modes of operation, cloud computing, user training and of course data protection.

LangTec was pleased to be able to contribute to the understanding of this dynamic market segment on the part of decision-makers in politics. It was a great opportunity to contribute an extensive ground-level view of our core competence, Semantic Text Processing, to interested scientist stakeholders. The results of all interviews will be published as a case study at the end of 2021.

23Aug

Visiting Academics: Two Linguistics Professors on Research Stay with LangTec

We are delighted to be hosting our two visiting linguistics professors Dr. Bettina Migge (University College Dublin) and Dr. Britta Schneider (Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder)) at the LangTec office this week. Aim of their research stay with us is the in-depth exchange on applied methods of computational linguistics and text analytics. Dr. Migge and Dr. Schneider jointly chair the working group “Ideologies, Beliefs, Attitudes” in the research network LITHME (Language In The Human-Machine Era). Together with our colleagues they have engaged in a number of extremely insightful and inspiring discussions about LangTec’s projects and possible intersections between academic linguistics and applied language technology in industry.

01Aug

Research Project ‘Analysis of Police Press Releases’

Not just a case for the police! The professor of journalism Dr. Thomas Hestermann of the Macromedia University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg and his team of researchers investigate how the police handle mentions of the origin of crime suspects and victims in police press releases. Subject to investigation is a corpus of 1.6 million police press releases containing more than 15.7 million sentences published between 2014 to 2018. The distinction of designations of origin for suspects and victims will be a central factor in the results of this research effort and cannot be accomplished robustly by simple keyword search or collocation analysis.

For this reason, LangTec supports the research effort with expertise in deep semantic text analytics. Analyses will be based on techniques permitting the clear discrimination of crime suspects and victims. Thus, while the textual realisations for denoting crime suspects and victims may be the same, deep semantic differences can be detected based on their differing deep structures.

15Jul

Development Support in the Digital Augmentation of TV Broadcasts

Microservice architectures enable the successful realisation of complex software systems using modular, heterogenous software components.

In this newly commissioned project LangTec supports a leading provider in the augmentation and personalisation of tv broadcasts by digital content. LangTec’s contribution focuses on the provision of expertise in microservice development in Java and Python as well as the functional improvement and extension of the backend infrastructure.