Welcome đ
Welcome to my homepage! I am Nils Feldhus and am currently working on my PhD thesis in explainable natural language processing at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence and the Technische UniversitÀt Berlin under the supervision of Sebastian Möller.
Research interests đ
My main research interest is making (neural) language models more interpretable by building applications that democratize access to explanations. Topics of interest are rationale generation, data-centric interpretability, information-seeking dialogue, and evaluation measures for generated text.
News đ€©
2024-03-23 : Excited to give a talk about Explanation Dialogues and the Role of Didactics in Explainability at the inaugural BIFOLD Tutorial Day on April 30.
2024-02-28 : Two new papers in submission: A follow-up to InterroLang on the conversational examination of self-explaining LLMs (LLMCheckup) and a resource and evaluation paper on instructional explanations in teacher-student dialogues (ReWIRED).
2023-11-13 : InterroLang will be presented as an in-person poster at BlackboxNLP (Thu, Dec 7, 11:00 AM) and Findings (Sat, Dec 9, 09:00 AM).
2023-11-03 : Invited talk at Human-Centric AI group of NEC Labs Europe, Heidelberg
2023-10-08 : âInterroLang: Exploring NLP Models and Datasets through Dialogue-based Explanationsâ accepted to EMNLP 2023 Findings! đŠ This is my fourth first-author paper and an implementation of the Mediators precursor paper.
2023-05-30 : Saliency Map Verbalization (first-author paper) accepted to ACL 2023! See you in Toronto! đ
2023-05-19 : Inseq accepted to ACL 2023! MultiTACRED which I reviewed for my colleagues has been accepted as well.
2023-02-27 : Inseq pre-print published on arXiv.
2022-12-26 : Three papers accepted to ESSV and HUCAPP. New interpretability library Inseq (project led by Gabriele Sarti) now available on GitHub.
2022-11-21 : Journal paper about âInteractive Explainable AIâ accepted to KI.
2022-10-14 : First-author paper on âSaliency Map Verbalizationâ is now on arXiv.
2022-10-13 : One paper I reviewed for my colleagues was accepted to the EMNLP 2022 main track.
2022-07-04 : Companion paper to âPersonalized Conversational Agentsâ accepted to SIGDIAL 2022.
2022-06-15 : Paper on âPersonalized Conversational Agentsâ accepted to INTERSPEECH 2022.
2022-06-14 : âMediatorsâ is now available on arXiv.
2022-06-04 : First-author paper âMediators: Conversational Agents Explaining Language Model Behaviorâ accepted to the IJCAI-ECAI 2022 Workshop on XAI.
2022-04-04 : Paper on âTextual Explanations for Clinical Decision Supportâ accepted to LREC as a poster.
2022-03-31 : Two papers I reviewed for my colleagues were accepted to the NLP-Power! and Repl4NLP workshops at ACL 2022
2022-03-22 : Project report on âXAI and meaningful information in automated decision-makingâ now available in full.
Publications đ
2024
ReWIRED: Instructional Explanations in Teacher-Student Dialogues
Nils Feldhus, Aliki Anagnostopoulou, João Lucas Mendes de Lemos Lins, Qianli Wang, Milad Alshomary, Henning Wachsmuth, Daniel Sonntag, and Sebastian Möller
In submission
OpenReview
LLMCheckup: Conversational Examination of Large Language Models via Interpretability Tools
Qianli Wang, Tatiana Anikina, Nils Feldhus, Josef van Genabith, Leonhard Hennig, and Sebastian Möller
In submission
arXiv | GitHub
2023
InterroLang: Exploring NLP Models and Datasets through Dialogue-based Explanations
Nils Feldhus, Qianli Wang, Tatiana Anikina, Sahil Chopra, Cennet Oguz, and Sebastian Möller
EMNLP 2023 Findings & BlackboxNLP Workshop
ACL Anthology | arXiv | GitHub
Saliency Map Verbalization: Comparing Feature Importance Representations from Model-free and Instruction-based Methods
Nils Feldhus, Leonhard Hennig, Maximilian Dustin Nasert, Christopher Ebert, Robert Schwarzenberg, and Sebastian Möller
ACL 2023 Workshop on Natural Language Reasoning and Structured Explanations (NLRSE)
ACL Anthology | arXiv | GitHub
Inseq: An Interpretability Toolkit for Sequence Generation Models
Gabriele Sarti, Nils Feldhus, Ludwig Sickert, Oskar van der Wal, Malvina Nissim, and Arianna Bisazza
ACL 2023 System Demonstrations
ACL Anthology | arXiv | GitHub | Project page
Pre-trained Language Models for the Automatic Evaluation of Customer Chatbot Dialogs
Mika Rebensburg, Stefan Hillmann, and Nils Feldhus
ESSV 2023
Proceedings
Adapters for Resource-Efficient Deployment of NLU Models
Jan Nehring, Akhyar Ahmed, and Nils Feldhus
ESSV 2023
Proceedings | GitHub
Fighting Disinformation - Overview of Recent AI-based Collaborative Human-Computer Interaction for Intelligent Decision Support Systems
Tim Polzehl, Vera Schmitt, Nils Feldhus, Joachim Meyer, and Sebastian Möller
HUCAPP 2023
SciTePress
2022
XAINES: Explaining AI with Narratives
Mareike Hartmann, Han Du, Nils Feldhus, Ivana Kruijff-KorbayovĂĄ, and Daniel Sonntag
KI - KĂŒnstliche Intelligenz
Journal article on Springer
Mediators: Conversational Agents Explaining NLP Model Behavior
Nils Feldhus, Ajay Madhavan Ravichandran, and Sebastian Möller
IJCAI-ECAI 2022 Workshop on XAI
arXiv | Slides
Towards Personality-aware Chatbots
Daniel Fernau, Stefan Hillmann, Nils Feldhus, Tim Polzehl, and Sebastian Möller
SIGDIAL 2022
ACL Anthology | Video (Live presentation)
Towards Automated Dialog Personalization using MBTI Personality Indicators
Daniel Fernau, Stefan Hillmann, Nils Feldhus, and Tim Polzehl
INTERSPEECH 2022
ISCA Proceedings
A Comparison of Feature Extraction Models for Medical Image Captioning
Sebastian Germer, Hristina Uzunova, Jan Ehrhardt, Nils Feldhus, Philippe Thomas, and Heinz Handels
GMDS-TMF 2022
PDF
An Annotated Corpus of Textual Explanations for Clinical Decision Support
Roland Roller, Aljoscha Burchardt, Nils Feldhus, Laura Seiffe, Klemens Budde, Simon Ronicke, and Bilgin Osmanodja
LREC 2022
ACL Anthology
What to explain when explaining is difficult? An interdisciplinary primer on XAI and meaningful information in automated decision-making
Hadi Asghari, Nadine Birner, Aljoscha Burchardt, Daniela Dicks, Judith Fassbinder, Nils Feldhus, Freya Hewett, Vincent Hofmann, Matthias C. Kettemann, Wolfgang Schulz, Judith Simon, Jakob Stolberg-Larsen, and Theresa ZĂŒger
Project report (published 2022-03-22)
Full report
2021
Thermostat: A Large Collection of NLP Model Explanations and Analysis Tools
Nils Feldhus, Robert Schwarzenberg, and Sebastian Möller
2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP): System Demonstrations
ACL Anthology | arXiv | GitHub | Video
Efficient Explanations from Empirical Explainers
Robert Schwarzenberg, Nils Feldhus, and Sebastian Möller
4th workshop on analyzing and interpreting neural networks for NLP (collocated with EMNLP 2021)
BlackboxNLP 2021 proceedings | arXiv | GitHub
Combining Open Domain Question Answering with a Task-Oriented Dialog System
Jan Nehring, Nils Feldhus, Harleen Kaur, and Akhyar Ahmed
1st Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering (DialDoc 2021)
ACL Anthology
European Language Grid: A Joint Platform for the European Language Technology Community
Georg Rehm et al.
16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL): System Demonstrations
EACL 2021 Proceedings
2020
Evaluating German Transformer Language Models with Syntactic Agreement Tests
Karolina Zaczynska, Nils Feldhus*, Robert Schwarzenberg, Aleksandra Gabryszak, and Sebastian Möller
5th Swiss Text Analytics Conference (SwissText) & 16th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS)
SwissText/KONVENS 2020 Proceedings | arXiv | GitHub
* joint first authorship
Towards an Interoperable Ecosystem of AI and LT Platforms: A Roadmap for the Implementation of Different Levels of Interoperability
Georg Rehm et al.
1st International Workshop on Language Technology Platforms (c/w LREC 2020)
IWLTP 2020 Proceedings
Education đšâđ
2021-2025 â Computer Science, PhD, Technische UniversitĂ€t Berlin. Supervised by Sebastian Möller: âApproaches for Generating and Evaluating Natural Language Explanations of Language Modelsâ
2016-2020 â Cognitive Systems: Language, Learning and Reasoning, MSc, University of Potsdam. Supervised by Manfred Stede: âUtilizing machine translation for bootstrapping abstractive text summarizationâ.
2013-2016 â Computational Linguistics, BA, Heidelberg University. Supervised by Katja Markert: âAn in-depth investigation on timeline summarization evaluationâ.
Jobs đšâđŒ
2021-ongoing â Researcher/Software Engineer @ German Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Berlin, Speech and Language Technology group.
XAINES - Explaining AI with Narratives project, supervised by Sebastian Möller.
2020-2021 â Researcher/Software Engineer @ German Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Berlin, Speech and Language Technology group.
European Language Grid project, supervised by Georg Rehm.
2014 â Student assistant at the Institute for Computational Linguistics @ Heidelberg University
Supervision đšââđ«
Supervised theses, open topics for prospective students and taught courses
Invited Talks
2024-04-30 : BIFOLD Tutorial Day on Foundation Models at Max DelbrĂŒck Center, Berlin â Explanation Dialogues for Understanding Foundation Model Behavior and Teaching Concepts
2023-11-03 : NEC Labs Europe, Heidelberg â Generating and Evaluating Human-Centric Explanations of Language Model Behavior
Reviews â
ACL 2024 Area Chair for Interpretability and Analysis Models for NLP track
NAACL 2024
EACL 2024
EMNLP 2023 (Main conference & BlackboxNLP workshop)
ACL 2023 (Reality Check theme track & Interpretability track)
EACL 2023
EMNLP 2022 (Interpretability, Interactivity and Analysis of Models track; BlackboxNLP 2022 workshop)
ACL Rolling Review (2021 November â ongoing)
ACL 2022 (+ Emergency Reviews)
As secondary reviewer:
NLDB 2022, BlackboxNLP 2021, EMNLP 2021, ACL 2021, NAACL 2021, WebConf 2021, IWLTP 2020, EMNLP 2020, ACL 2020
Recommended
Video tutorials and publications I recommend
Mail đš
nils (dot) feldhus (at) dfki (dot) de
feldhusnlp (at) gmail (dot) com
Links đ
DFKI Profile
GitHub
GitLab
Semantic Scholar
Google Scholar
OpenReview
Twitter
Mastodon (sigmoid.social)
Tools I love to work with đ§°
PyTorch, Hugging Face datasets + transformers and Captum : My âExplainable NLP toolboxâ
PyCharm + Atom : Preferred editors for writing code
Obsidian.md (+ dataview), Zotero and Semantic Scholar (API) : Paper management
Leisure activities and other interests đ”
Hosting two web radio shows where I mix ambient (Neptunian @ FRISKY Radio, since 2014) and atmospheric electronic music (Idolatry @ Proton Radio, since 2015). Iâve been producing mixes for Mixcloud since 2011. All of these are available on helioscope.net.
Cycling and hiking
Nature photography