Multilinguality and Language Technology

QAIE Team

We are a team at the MLT-Lab at DFKI specializing on Question Answering (QA) and Information Extraction (IE) – simply QAIE.

Question Answering (finding and extracting answers for natural language questions from text) and Information Extraction (extracting entities and relations from text) are closely related: both share a number of sub-tasks like named entity recognition, relation extraction and entity linking. We research and develop methods combining Language Technology, Machine Learning and Deep Learning from core components to complete end-to-end solutions. We develop QAIE solutions in many application areas, including e-Health, BioNLP, e-Learning, and intelligent assistance.

Demo: Automatic Question Generation with Deep Learning

Some current projects:

3SC – Semantic Search for Science Communication

Launched in 2019, the joint project of Informationsdienst Wissenschaft (idw) and DFKI uses the Generalized Semantics Retrieval Engine (GSRE) of the QAIE research group for semantic search on the distribution service for scientific press releases in Germany.

Project Page

PRECISE4Q

Period: 01.05.2018–30.04.2022
Personalised Medicine by Predictive Modelling in Stroke for better Quality of Life, funded by EU.

Project Page

Fair Forward

Period: 01.05.2020–30.06.2021
Consulting services to Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) on technical aspects of AI in international cooperation including natural language processing (NLP), training data and data access for FAIR Forward – Artificial Intelligence for All. GIZ Project No. 19.2010.7-003.00

Project Page

CORA4NLP

Co(n)textual Reasoning and Adaptation for Natural Language Processing

Period: 01.10.2020-30.09.2023, funded by BMBF.

Project website

XAINES

XAINES (01.09.2020 - 31.08.2024): Explaining AI with Narratives

Funded by BMBF (01IW20005).

Project website

Selected recent publications:

Stalin Varanasi, Saadullah Amin and Günter Neumann (2021) AutoEQA: Auto-Encoding Questions for Extractive Question Answering, In Proceedings of Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-2021), Nov. 2021.
Saadullah Amin, Günter Neumann (2021) T2NER: Transformers based transfer learning framework for named entity recognition, In Proceedings of EACL, 2021.
Saadullah Amin, Stalin Varanasi, Katherine Dunfield, Günter Neumann (2020) LowFER: Low-rank Bilinear Pooling for Link Prediction. In: Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-2020), Online, PMLR 119, 2020.
Saadullah Amin, Katherine Dunfield, Anna Vechkaeva, Günter Neumann (2020) A Data-driven Approach for Noise Reduction in Distantly Supervised Biomedical Relation Extraction. In: BioNLP 2020 Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing. Workshop on Current Trends in Biomedical Natural Language Processing (BioNLP-2020) located at The 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics July 9-9 ACL 2020.
Stalin Varanasi, Saadullah Amin, Günter Neumann (2020) CopyBERT: A Unified Approach to Question Generation with Self-Attention. In: NLP for Conversational AI - Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop. NLP for Conversational AI (NLPConvAI-2020) July 9-9 Pages 25-31 ISBN 978-1-952148-08-8 ACL 2020.