Technische Universität Darmstadt (UKP Lab)
Our role in OpenMinTeD
The Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab leads the WP 5 “Interoperability framework”, the task 5.2 “Infrastructure interoperability specifications” as well as the use-case task 9.4 “Social Sciences” and is further involved in WP 6 “Platform design”, and WP 7 “Platform integration”Background on the UKP Lab
The Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab is the endowed Lichtenberg Chair in the Department of Computer Science at the Technische Universität Darmstadt (supported by the Volkswagen Foundation from 2009 to 2016).
The Chair has been established with the help of generous financial support from the Emmy Noether Young Researchers’ Career Award by the German Research Foundation (DFG), a Lichtenberg Professorship by the Volkswagen Foundation, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and the Klaus Tschira Foundation. Since December 2009, UKP Lab has become a permanent establishment at the Department of Computer Science of TU Darmstadt. It is the founding member of the Department’s research priority topic “Knowledge Processing in the Web”. The UKP Lab led the LOEWE Research Center “Digital Humanities” at TU Darmstadt (together with the University of Frankfurt) from 2011 to 2014. Since December 2014, it jointly leads the newly established CEDIFOR. In 2013, the UKP Lab established the Graduate Program “Knowledge Discovery in Scientific Publications” (KDSL), funded by the German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF) in Frankfurt. Since 2015, UKP leads the Research Training Group (GRK 1994) “Adaptive Information Preparation of Heterogeneous Sources” (AIPHES) at TU Darmstadt, funded by the German Research Foundation. Within these programs, multiple research groups from Darmstadt and Heidelberg cooperate.Our research
The UKP Lab carries out cutting-edge research in natural language processing (NLP) with a strong emphasis on lexical-semantic resources and algorithms, and the innovative applications of NLP to novel problems in social media, social sciences, and humanities. Our aim is to develop new approaches to automatically process and manage the knowledge represented in a variety of forms and repositories, with a strong focus on textual information processing and large-scale content analysis on the Web.
With DKPro, the UKP Lab offers an open-source, industrial-strength framework for a wide variety of NLP tasks. These include general-purpose tools for parsing, POS tagging, tokenization, etc., as well as specialized frameworks for corpus annotation, text classification, text similarity, and word sense disambiguation. We also produce and maintain multiple linguistic datasets and resources. Foremost among these is UBY, our large-scale unified lexical-semantic resource, which integrates ten different linguistic and Web-based lexical-semantic knowledge bases in English and German. Distinguishing features of UBY are the sense links between individual resources and its standardized representation.Collaborations and cooperations
We maintain close research cooperation with companies, e.g. in online publishing, such as Holtzbrinck Digital, as part of the BMBF-funded SoftwareCampus program, and we are a member of several academic networks of excellence. We are affiliated with the Frankfurt eHumanities Center, the German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF), and the Center for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt.