Fellow-Klasse 2025/26 Prof. Dr. Anette Frank
Arbeitsvorhaben am Marsilius-Kolleg
Efficient Knowledge Acquisition and Utilization in Human Cognition and Language Models
Humans face a new era where machine intelligence approaches parity with our cognitive abilities. Early science fiction scenarios have become reality - what lies ahead is hard to predict. In face of this, it is of utmost importance to understand the similarities and differences between human cognition and machine intelligence. Our project will compare information uptake in AI systems and humans that specialize in rapid language understanding and production: large language models and interpreters. We will analyze how both ingest new information and integrate it with pre-existing knowledge while
preventing forgetting of old information. For this we study and compare how the human brain and language models integrate new information for effective storage and retrieval via variable cues. This will allow us to understand and generalize strategies for efficient information uptake, consolidation and usability in both systems. In sum, our project aims to i) deepen our understanding of human cognition in comparison to knowledge processing in AI models, to ii) improve the learning strategies of LLMs and Simultaneous Interpreters, and to iii) transfer our insights to the domain of mental health. Our group is ideally suited for this project, as each field imports disciplinary insights that contribute to a holistic understanding of cognitive abilities that will be important across disciplines and society at large.
FORSCHUNGSGEBIETE
My research in Natural Language Processing focuses on representing the meaning of discourse and dialogue to create systems that assist humans in advanced information processing tasks, from question-answering to argumentation. I combine neural machine learning with linguistic modeling, knowledge representation and inference methods, extended to multimodal settings. Neural machine le arning, Language models, Semantics, Multilinguality, Knowledge-based systems and Natural Language Inference
Lebenslauf
Beruflicher Werdegang
- 2007 – Prof. of Computational Linguistics, Uni Heidelberg
- 2002 Habilitation Computational Linguistics, Uni Stuttgart
- 2002 W3 replacement, Inst. Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung, Stuttgart
- 2000-2007 Senior Researcher, Language Technology Lab, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Saarbrücken
- 1997-2000 Researcher, Multilingual Theory & Technology Lab, Xerox Research Center Europe, Grenoble
Ausbildung
- 1997 PhD Computational Linguistics, Uni Stuttgart
- 1991-1997 Researcher, Inst. f. Masch. Sprachverarbeitung, Uni Stuttgart
- 1991 Master: Linguistics, Computer Science, Romance Lang & Literature, Uni Stuttgart
Ausgewählte Publikationen
Tabelle
Plenz, M. & Frank, A. (2024): Graph Language Models. Proc. of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Assoc. for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024), 4477- 4494, Bangkok, Thailand. |
Fu, X. & Frank, A. (2024): Exploring Continual Learning of Compositional Generalization in NLI, Transactions of the Assoc. for Computational Linguistics (TACL), 12, 912—932. |
Parcalabescu, L. & Frank, A. (2024): On Measuring Faithfulness or Self-consistency of Natural Language Explanations, Proc. of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Assoc. for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024), 6048—6089, Bangkok, Thailand. |
Plenz, M., Opitz, J., Heinisch, P., Cimiano, P., & Frank, A. (2023): Similarity-weighted Construction of Contextualized Commonsense Knowledge Graphs for Knowledge- intense Argumentation Tasks. Proc. of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Assoc. for Computational Linguistics, Toronto, Canada. |
Opitz, J. and Frank, A. (2018): Addressing the Winograd Schema Challenge as a Sequence Ranking Task. Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Language, Cognition and Computational Models (LCCM), Santa Fe, New Mexico, pp. 41--52. |
Erdem, E., Kuyu, M., Yagcioglu, S., Frank, A., Parcalabescu, L., Plank, B., Babii, A., Turuta, O., Erdem, A., Calixto, I., Lloret, E., Apostol, E., Truică, C., Šandrih, B., Gatt, A., Martinčić-Ipšić, S., Berend, G., and Korvel, G. (2022): Neural Natural Language Generation: A Survey on Multilinguality, Multimodality, Controllability and Learning. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 73. |
Paul, D. and Frank, A. (2020): Social Commonsense Reasoning with Multi-Head Knowledge Attention. In Findings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). |
Mihaylov, T. and Frank, A. (2018): Knowledgeable Reader: Enhancing Cloze-Style Reading Comprehension with External Commonsense Knowledge. Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. |
Buitelaar, P., Cimiano, P., Frank, A., Hartung, M., and Racioppa, S. (2008): Ontology-based Information Extraction and Integration from Heterogenous Data Sources. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 66:11, pp. 759-788. |
Frank, A., Krieger, H.-U., Xu, F., Uskoreit, H., Crysmann, B., Jörg, B., and Schäfer, U. (2007): Question Answering from Structured Knowledge Sources. Jour. of Applied Logic. Special Issue on Questions & Answers: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives, 5:2, 20-48. |