We're already halfway through 2024! We had a lively exchange with some inspiring guests in the first half of the year. ✨ We want to thank you, Mark Algee-Hewitt, the Stanford LitLab, Yvonne Völkl and Elisabeth Hobisch, Nils Reiter, Tom Hanika and Hans Ole Hatzel for visiting us in Darmstadt!
Hans Ole Hatzel gave us an insight into the jungle of evaluation options for NLP methods. By then at the latest, it was clear to us: we need new ways to evaluate LLMs & we don't just need new approaches, but also ones that don't use too many resources and that are generalizable - sounds realistic?
Tom Hanika (tomhanika.de) from Hildesheim presented mathematical approaches to concepts, ranging from conceptual structures to topic flows. Did you know that Formal concept analysis was mainly developed under the direction of Rudolf Wille at the TU Darmstadt? - we didn’t and were quite surprised!
As you've already seen on our SM accounts: Nils Reiter presented on LLMs. This session showed us that LLMs can support annotation tasks, but also that they must be treated with caution as they are unreliable.
Y. Völkl and E. Hobisch presented their project on Corona Fictions & discussed our ChiA project with us. We learned that they provide a great resource, realized how well the use of existing tools can work & that you don't have to always develop new solutions! (www.zotero.org/groups/48142...)
We had an amazing week-long workshop with the Stanford Literary Lab, which was dedicated to our joint interests in topics like literary theory, events, and domestic space annotation. We are so happy to have generated some great ideas for joint projects! (litlab.stanford.edu)
The Stanford Literary Lab is a research collective that applies computational criticism, in all its forms, to the study of literature.
Mark Algee-Hewitt visited us in January and gave a lecture on "Climate Fiction" where he demonstrated a compelling way to explore where climate fiction reiterates the strategies of climate disinformation. We welcomed Mark back to Darmstadt in April, this time with some LitLab members.