Internal note for our chair: each of us should offer / provide 12 months of supervision every year. Each thesis or project "counts" just like it counts for the students, where #months = #ECTS / 4. That is, B.Sc. project = 6 ECTS = 1.5 months, M.Sc. project = 16 ECTS = 4 months, B.Sc. thesis = 12 ECTS = 3 months, M.Sc. thesis = 25 ECTS = 6 months.
List of available and ongoing topics for current B.Sc. and M.Sc. projects and theses
Note to interested students: if all projects in this list are ongoing, this means that our current capacity for supervising projects is reached. Maybe, if you come back later, there will be an offer again. You can also propose a topic on your own.
TODO: project + thesis offered/supervised by Björn
Information Extraction from Noun Compounds (thesis, available): Noun compounds like US president Barack Obama or 3rd century Roman writer Censorinus can carry a lot of valuable information. Here: Barack Obama is president of the US and Censorinus is a roman writer from the 3d century. Noun compounds have been studied from a linguistic point of view, e.g. http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nakov/selected_papers_list/TSLP2013.pdf , but so far they have largely been ignored in information extraction tasks (i.e. generate triples of the expressed facts like (Barack Obama) (is president of) (the US)). The task of this thesis will be to research current state-of-the art approaches for understanding noun compounds and implement/adapt/improve them to extract information in triple-form. Good if you know something about machine learning but not absolutely necessary. supervised by Elmar Haussmann
Semantic Search Engine Prototype utilizing Distributional Semantics (project, available): Distributional semantics is a hot topic in natural language processing right now. It allows representing words (and phrases) as vectors in a multi-dimensional space such that words with similar meaning have low distance, e.g. "Friday" and "Saturday", "king" and "queen", or "Freiburg" and "Stuttgart". Tools to generate these vectors are freely available, e.g. from Google: https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/. The task will be to generate word vectors, assess their quality, and (depending on quality) implement a prototype search engine utilizing them, e.g. for resolving synonyms. Good if you heard the information retrieval lecture, but not absolutely necessary. supervised by Elmar Haussmann
Semantic Search Engine Prototype for OpenIE (thesis or larger project, available): Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) extracts triples like (Barack Obama) (is president of) (the US) from natural language text. Recent OpenIE systems perform well, but it is yet to be shown that these triples can be used effectively for information retrieval tasks. First systems already exist, e.g. http://openie.cs.washington.edu/. The task will be to investigate how to best search on OpenIE triples, implement a search engine prototype similar to the existing one and asses/evaluate it. You should be proficient in programming in C++ or Java and it is good if you heard the information retrieval lecture. supervised by Elmar Haussmann
TODO: project + thesis offered/supervised by Florian
TODO: project + thesis offered/supervised by Claudius
TODO: project + thesis offered/supervised by Sabine
Question Answering using Semantic Full-Text Search (thesis, available): Use our semantic full-text search engine Broccoli for the FACTOID and LIST questions from one of the TREC Questions Answering benchmarks, e.g. http://trec.nist.gov/data/qa/2006_qadata/QA2006_testset.xml . What is the performance of manually constructed queries, and what can be done to improve it? Good if you heard the information retrieval lecture before, but not absolutely necessary ... supervised by Hannah Bast and TBA
Improved Transfer Patterns Routing (thesis or larger project, available): Public transit routing at Google currently implements the transfer patterns algorithm from this paper: http://ad-publications.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/ESA_transferpatterns_BCEGHRV_2010.pdf . The evaluation in this paper is outdated, and we know of several possible major improvements in the meantime. In particular, we know how to accelerate the pre-processing time by a factor of about 10. The goal of this thesis would we to implement a much improved version of transfer patterns and properly benchmark it ... supervised by Hannah Bast and Sabine Storandt
An easy-to-use web app for the CompleteSearch engine (project, available): The CompleteSearch engine complex search capabilities (including prefix search and faceted search) on semi-structured data (text and databases) with very fast query times. Our current software is powerful and flexible, but has quite a learning curve before it can be used. The goal of this project would be to set up a web app, where one can upload any CSV dataset, and then have a convenient search (with meaningful default settings), without having to set up anything oneself. This would be an extremely useful web application ... supervised by Hannah Bast
Completed B.Sc. or M.Sc. projects and theses
[Die Liste ist noch unvollständig, insbesondere fehlen gerade noch die ganzen Projekte. Titel der Arbeit sollte da auch noch stehen und ein Link zur jeweiligen Webseite bzw. Arbeit und Präsentation. Und das Anfangs- und Enddatum.]
B.Sc. thesis Philipp Bausch (Elmar)
M.Sc. thesis Eugen Sawin (Hannah)
M.Sc. thesis Patrick Brosi (Hannah + Sabine)
B.Sc. thesis Marius Bethge (Björn)
M.Sc. thesis Cynthia Jimenez (Sabine)
M.Sc. thesis Jonas Sternisko (Hannah)
M.Sc. thesis Ragavan Natarajan (Florian)
B.Sc. thesis Benjamin Meier (Claudius)
M.Sc. thesis Susanne Eichel (Hannah)
B.Sc. thesis Axel Lehmann (Hannah)
B.Sc. thesis Adrian Batzill (Hannah)
B.Sc. thesis Anton Stepan (Björn)
M.Sc. thesis Mirko Brodesser (Hannah + Sabine)
M.Sc. thesis Manuel Braun (Hannah + Sabine)
B.Sc. thesis Robin Schirrmeister (Hannah)
B.Sc. thesis Simon Skilevic (Hannah)
M.Sc. thesis Ilinca Tudose (Hannah + Elmar)
B.Sc. thesis Christiane Schaffer (Florian)
M.Sc. thesis Dirk Kienle (Hannah)
B.Sc. thesis Ina Baumgarten (Hannah + Björn)
B.Sc. thesis Niklas Meinzer (Hannah + Björn)
M.Sc. thesis Claudius Korzen (Hannah)
M.Sc. thesis Florian Bäurle (Hannah)
M.Sc. thesis Elmar Haußmann (Hannah)
M.Sc. thesis Oliver Mitevski (Hannah + Marjan)
M.Sc. thesis Björn Buchhold (Hannah)
Diploma thesis Johannes Schwenk (Hannah)
B.Sc. thesis Mirko Brodesser (Hannah + Marjan)