Welcome! 👋 I am an incoming Postdoctoral Researcher at the Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin) under the supervision of Sebastian Möller (Quality and Usability Lab) and the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning (BIFOLD), affiliated with the XplaiNLP group as a Senior Researcher as well as with the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) as a guest researcher.
Research interests 👀
My main research interest is the interpretability of language models with the goal of increasing the trust and reliability for users and simplifying access to explanations. Other topics include rationale generation, text simplification and summarization, dialogue systems, biomedical and clinical NLP, and evaluation measures for model-generated text.
News 🤩
2025-03-18 | First time serving as an editor: Together with Britta Schulte, I published the proceedings of the ISCA-ITG Workshop on Diversity in Large Speech and Language Models.
2025-03-14 | Honored to be (co-)supervising four incredibly talented PhD students at TU Berlin from now on: Arthur Hilbert, Qianli Wang, Luis Felipe Villa-Arenas, and Steffen Castle.
2025-02-13 | New first-author paper on explanation strategies and response generation in conversational XAI in submission.
2025-02-07 | I gave an invited talk at the University of Groningen about human-centric explainable NLP. 🇳🇱
2025-01-25 | New co-authored paper in submission: FitCF: A Framework for Automatic Feature Importance-based Counterfactual Example Generation.
2024-12-29 | I published my 2024 Recap showcasing my favorite papers from this year’s major conferences.
2024-11-30 | I am joining TU Berlin and BIFOLD in January 2025. My project IlluminateCardio will focus on the interpretability of large language models, human-AI alignment, and applications to cardiovascular medicine in collaboration with Prof. Alexander Meyer (Charité). 🏛️🏥
2024-11-30 | Cross-Refine accepted for COLING 2025.
2024-09-30 | CoXQL: A Dataset for Parsing Explanation Requests in Conversational XAI Systems has been accepted to EMNLP 2024 Findings and will be presented by Qianli in Miami, FL, USA. 🗽 His new work Cross-Refine is out on arXiv and currently in submission.
2024-09-08 | Traveling to Japan next week! 🗾 I will first give a talk at Eiji Aramaki’s Social Computing Lab at NAIST (Nara), attend the YRRSDS and SIGDIAL 2024 in Kyoto, and then head to Tokyo for INLG 2024.
2024-07-21 | Paper on sycophancy and political bias evaluation of (German) LLMs accepted to INLG 2024. I will visit Tokyo and present the poster on behalf of Max who I supervised. 🗼
2024-07-12 | First-author paper on instructional explanations in teacher-student dialogues accepted to ACM GoodIT. 🗝
2024-07-02 | Two new co-authored papers: On free-text rationale generation and readability (posted on arXiv) and on feature attribution for multimodal medical decision support (accepted to BioNLP @ ACL 2024).
2024-06-21 | New paper on intent recognition for conversational XAI, CoXQL, posted on arXiv.
2024-06-02 | QoEXplainer accepted to QoMEX and ACM IMX 2024.
2024-04-19 | LLMCheckup accepted to NAACL 2024 HCI+NLP! System demo paper on dialogue-based explainability for video streaming quality of experience in submission.
2024-03-31 | New paper on disinformation detection and the role of explainability accepted to FAccT 2024!
Education 👨🎓
2021-2025 – Computer Science, PhD, Technische Universität Berlin. Supervised by Sebastian Möller: “Approaches for Generating and Evaluating Natural Language Explanations of Language Models”.
2016-2020 – Cognitive Systems: Language, Learning and Reasoning, MSc, University of Potsdam. Supervised by Manfred Stede: “Utilizing machine translation for bootstrapping abstractive text summarization”.
2013-2016 – Computational Linguistics, BA, Heidelberg University. Supervised by Katja Markert: “An in-depth investigation on timeline summarization evaluation”.
Jobs 👨💼
2025-2027: Postdoctoral Researcher @ TU Berlin & BIFOLD. Projects: IlluminateCardio (“Interpretable Large Language Models for the Cardiovascular Medicine”), VERANDA (“Trustworthy Anonymization of Sensitive Patient Records for Remote Consultation”).
2020-2024: Researcher/Software Engineer @ German Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Berlin, Speech and Language Technology group. Projects: 2021-2024 – XAINES - Explaining AI with Narratives project, supervised by Sebastian Möller 2020-2021 – European Language Grid project, supervised by Georg Rehm.
2014: Student assistant at the Institute for Computational Linguistics @ Heidelberg University
Leisure activities and other interests 🎵
Hosting two web radio shows where I mix ambient (Neptunian @ FRISKY Radio, since 2014) and atmospheric electronic music (Idolatry @ Proton Radio, since 2015). I’ve been producing mixes for Mixcloud since 2011. All of these are available on helioscope.net.
Cycling and hiking
Nature photography