email: contact101@alexanderfraser.de
web: alexfraser.github.io

Office hours: by appointment (please email)
Telephone hours: by appointment (please email)

Current position: Professor for Data Analytics & Statistics at TUM. Also PI of the Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML) and member of the ELLIS Unit Munich. Interested in the intersection of natural language processing and machine learning.

Recent Activities

• Lavine's paper on multilingual instruction tuning and Kathy's survey on multilingual alignment of LLMs were accepted to Findings of ACL! Congrats! See the publications page.

• A paper on our work with the Bundesbank on using NLP for analyzing corpora sustainability reports with a focus on green indicators has been accepted to ClimateNLP 2024 (at ACL). Here is a link to the Bundesbank report (content is the same).

• Welcome to Dr. Daryna Dementieva, a new postdoc in the group working on toxic content in general and on the DFG project on transfer learning for hate speech detection!

• Prisca is presenting her dataset on translated metaphors (VOLIMET, work also with Sabine) at *SEM and Yaqi is presenting her work with Viktor on class imbalance in abusive language detection at WOAH (both colocated with NAACL 2024). Congrats! See the publications page.

• We are advertising a PhD position and a postdoc position, located at TUM in Heilbronn (near Stuttgart). See the jobs page

• Welcome to Dr. Shu Okabe, a new postdoc in the group working on the ERC Proof of Concept project and related low resource language technologies!

• Three papers at LREC-COLING 2024 in Torino, Italy. Viktor has a paper on a new technique for classifying hate speech inspired by multitask learning, Marion has a new paper looking at whether Large Language Models understand morphologically complex words, and our work with Fabian Simonjetz, Enrique Jimenez and others on reconstructing cuneiform texts has been improved and (finally) accepted. See the publications page.

• I am a senior area chair (for Machine Translation) at EMNLP 2024 in Miami.

• I have moved to TUM computer science! New job update: I have started the chaired professorship for Data Analytics & Statistics at the computer science department of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in the School of Computation, Information and Technology. My main functions at TUM will be at the new campus in Heilbronn (near Stuttgart). But I will also be in Munich and Garching occasionally. I'd like to thank the current and past members of my research team for their great work! Thanks also to my former colleagues at CIS and LMU Munich, and to the entire CIS community.

• Older activities here

Research

Publications and Research Interests

Curriculum Vitae

ERC Starting Grant (EU Horizon2020)

Health in my Language (HimL) (EU Horizon2020)

Models of Morphosyntax for Statistical Machine Translation (DFG Project (2 phases))

TTC - Terminology Extraction, Translation Tools and Comparable Corpora (EU FP7 Project)

Teaching

click here

Bio

Biography

Post-docs

Dr. Daryna Dementieva, 06/2024-, TUM, DFG

Dr. Shu Okabe, 05/2024-, TUM, ERC

Dr. Lukas Edman, 02/2024-, DFG Unsup, MCML

Dr. Marion Di Marco (nee Weller), 09/2019-, LMUExcellent, DFG Unsup

Dr. Viktor Hangya, 01/2017-, MCML, ERC

Dr. Jindřich Libovický, 09/2019-12/2021, ERC and DFG Unsup

Dr. Matthias Huck, 04/2016-03/2020, ERC and HimL

Dr. Fabienne Braune, 01/2016-12/2017, ERC and HimL (also Morphosyntax 2)

Dr. Aleš Tamchyna, 01/2017-04/2017. HimL and ERC (jointly supervised with Prof. Jan Hajic, Charles University Prague)

Dr. Tsuyoshi Okita, 01/2016-12/2016, ERC

Dr. Liane Guillou, 04/2016-09/2016, HimL

Ph.D. Students

Sarah Ball (with Frauke Kreuter). 11/2023-, Fellow in Konrad Zuse School of Excellence in Reliable AI; Moral Reasoning in Large Language Models

Faeze Ghorbanpour (with Viktor Hangya). 09/2023-, DFG Transfer Learning for Hate Speech Detection; Hate Speech Detection, Transfer Learning

Irina Bigoulaeva (with Iryna Gurevych, TU Darmstadt). 10/2021-, TU Darmstadt funding; Transfer Learning and Hate Speech Detection

Katharina Hämmerl (with Jindrich Libovicky, now Charles U Prague). 07/2021-, MCML, DFG Unsup; Multilingual Representations

Prisca Piccirilli (with Sabine Schulte im Walde, U Stuttgart). 07/2021-, Studienstiftung Scholarship, Joint Stuttgart and LMU DFG funding; Metaphor Translation

Wen (Lavine) Lai 04/2021-, LMU/CSC; Low Resource NMT, Domain Adaptation

Sophie Henning (with Annemarie Friedrich, Bosch) 01/2021-, Bosch; Calibration

Alexandra Chronopoulou 09/2019-, MCML, ERC, DFG Unsup; Multilingual Transfer Learning, Unsupervised MT

Dr. rer. nat. Dario Stojanovski 06/2017-06/2021, Modeling Contextual Information in Neural Machine Translation, ERC; Context-Aware NMT, Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised MT. First permanent position after graduation: Microsoft.

Dr. phil. Anita Ramm (nee Gojun), 05/2013-03/2018, Modeling the position and inflection of verbs in English to German machine translation. First position after graduation: BeOne Stuttgart GmbH.

Dr. phil. Marion Weller-Di Marco (nee Weller) (with Sabine Schulte im Walde), 12/2011-09/2017, Using Morpho-Syntactic and Semantic Information to Improve Statistical Machine Translation. First position after graduation: Post-doc at University of Amsterdam with Khalil Sima'an.

Dr. rer. nat. Fabienne Braune (with Andreas Maletti), 10/2009-11/2015, Decoding Strategies for Syntax-based Statistical Machine Translation. First position after graduation: Post-doc on deep learning and comparable corpora in my group.

Dr. phil. Fabienne Cap (nee Fritzinger), 10/2009-10/2014, Morphological Processing of Compounds for Statistical Machine Translation. First position after graduation: Post-doc at Uppsala with Joakim Nivre.

Dr. rer. nat. Nadir Durrani (with Helmut Schmid), 04/2008-11/2012, A Joint Translation Model With Integrated Reordering. First position after graduation: Post-doc with Philipp Koehn, U. Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.

Dr. rer. nat. Hassan Sajjad (with Helmut Schmid), 04/2008-10/2012, Statistical Models for Unsupervised, Semi-supervised and Supervised Transliteration Mining. First position after graduation: Research Scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute. Currently: Associate Professor, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Visiting Ph.D. Students

Denis Peskov (University of Maryland College Park). 01/2020 to 10/2020

Simon Rieß (LMU Data Science). 10/2019 to 12/2019

Viktor Hangya (University of Szeged). 10/2016 to 12/2016

Ales Tamchyna (Charles University Prague). 10/2015 to 05/2016

Marija Brkic (University of Zagreb, Croatia). 09/2010 to 02/2011

Information for Students

Guidelines for students who are interested in visiting

Recommendation letters for students

Other Links

What I work on (for non-specialists)