Simon Ostermann

Simon Ostermann

NLP & AI Researcher @ DFKI

Email: simon.ostermann@dfki.de

Address: Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
66123 Saarbrücken

Welcome 👋

I am a senior researcher and deputy director at the Multilinguality and Language Technology (MLT) lab at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, where I am currently leading mid-sized research projects. I lead the research group on Efficient and Explainable NLP (E&E) at the MLT lab.

DFKI

My research broadly focuses on making language technology more accessible and fair. I focus on transparent and robust language models and language technologies. Specifically, I aim to make the parameters and behavior of language models more interpretable to both end users and researchers, drawing on methods from Explainable Artificial Intelligence and Mechanistic Interpretability. I also work on improving the robustness and efficiency of language models, particularly by enhancing their data efficiency using structured inputs, novel learning and adaptation techniques, and multimodal approaches. I especially focus on Low-Resource Languages. Additionally, I am interested in reducing model size to enable deployment in resource-constrained environments.

In side projects, I'm also exploring the factuality of model-generated outputs and I have worked on multimodal models. My work primarily involves large language models trained using deep learning techniques. I also have extensive experience in data acquisition and crowdsourcing, as well as in educational NLP.

Selected Publications 📰

For a full list of publications, including preprints, please check my Google Scholar Profile

Teaching 🏫

I am also teaching at Saarland University. Here is a list of my ongoing courses:

  • Seminar, Summer 2024: XPLN - Exploring Explainability in NLP
  • Seminar, Summer 2024: Efficient and Robust Natural Language Processing
  • Seminar, Summer 2023: XPLN - Exploring Explainability in NLP
  • Software Project, Summer 2023: BERT and Friends – Pretrained LMs in Natural Language Understanding
  • Seminar, Summer 2022: BERT and Friends - Pretrained LMs in Computational Semantics

Supervision 🎓

I'm happy to collaborate with and advise the following PhD students:

Ongoing MSc Theses

My team and I are happy to supervise the following MSc theses:

If you are interested in writing your MSc thesis with my E&E group, please send me a mail with a short topic outline, a CV and a transcript of records. Please note that we get many such requests and cannot collaborate with everybody that is interested.

Finished MSc Theses

Talks and Service

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