Peer-Reviewed Publications

Want Better Synthetic Data? Steer It: Activation Steering for Low-Resource Language Generation

Jan Cegin, Daniil Gurgurov, Yusser Al Ghussin, and Simon Ostermann · Accepted at the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main) EMNLP

When Tokenization is Secretly Output Supervision

Tanja Baeumel, Josef van Genabith, and Simon Ostermann · Accepted at the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main) EMNLP

FineWeb-CLaR: Culture, Language, and Region Annotations for Benchmark-Aligned Corpus Auditing

Yusser Al Ghussin, Eva Gavaller, Cristina España-Bonet, Josef van Genabith, and Simon Ostermann · Accepted at the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main) EMNLP

Macro: Enhancing Multilingual Counterfactual Explanations through Alignment-as-Preference Optimization

Yilong Wang, Qianli Wang, Bohao Chu, Yihong Liu, Jing Yang, and Simon Ostermann · Accepted at the Findings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing EMNLP

Can Large Language Models Still Explain Themselves? Investigating the Impact of Quantization on Self-Explanations

Qianli Wang, Nils Feldhus, Pepa Atanasova, Fedor Splitt, Simon Ostermann, Sebastian Möller, and Vera Schmitt · Accepted at the Findings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing EMNLP

Separating Syntax from Language: A Mechanistic Account of Translation in Multilingual LLMs

Mikhail Sonkin, Tanja Baeumel, Daniil Gurgurov, Josef van Genabith, and Simon Ostermann · Accepted at the Findings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing EMNLP

The Latin Substrate: How Language Models Represent and Mediate Script Choice

Daniil Gurgurov, Alan Saji, Katharina Trinley, Josef van Genabith, and Simon Ostermann · Accepted at the 9th BlackboxNLP Workshop BlackBoxNLP

Limitations of Automated Simulatability: LLM Simulators Can Bypass Explanations

Antonin Poché, Fanny Jourdan, Nils Feldhus, Qianli Wang, Jing Yang, Simon Ostermann, Nicholas Asher, Philippe Muller, and Vera Schmitt · Accepted at the 9th BlackboxNLP Workshop Special Track: Reproducibility and Reliability in Interpretability Analyses BlackBoxNLP

Compositional Multilingual and Behavioral Attribute Steering

Hyun Gu Kang, Daniil Gurgurov, Tanja Baeumel, Josef van Genabith, and Simon Ostermann · Accepted at the 9th BlackboxNLP Workshop BlackBoxNLP

From Weights to Activations: Is Steering the Next Frontier of Adaptation?

Simon Ostermann, Daniil Gurgurov, Tanja Baeumel, Michael A. Hedderich, Sebastian Lapuschkin, Wojciech Samek, and Vera Schmitt · Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) ACL

Why Does Reinforcement Learning Generalize? A Feature-Level Mechanistic Study of Post-Training in Large Language Models

Dan Shi, Zhuowen Han, Simon Ostermann, Renren Jin, Josef van Genabith, and Deyi Xiong · Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) ACL

DualFact+: A Multimodal Fact Verification Framework for Procedural Video Captioning

Cennet Oguz, Yasser Hamidullah, Josef van Genabith, and Simon Ostermann · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026 ACL

CLaS-Bench: A Cross-Lingual Alignment and Steering Benchmark

Daniil Gurgurov, Yusser Al Ghussin, Tanja Baeumel, Cheng-Ting Chou, Patrick Schramowski, Marius Mosbach, Josef van Genabith, and Simon Ostermann · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026 ACL

Multilingual Steering by Design: Multilingual Sparse Autoencoders and Principled Layer Selection

Yusser Al Ghussin, Daniil Gurgurov, Tanja Baeumel, Josef van Genabith, Patrick Schramowski, and Simon Ostermann · Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Trustworthy NLP (TrustNLP 2026) TrustNLP

Through a Compressed Lens: Investigating The Impact of Quantization on Factual Knowledge Recall

Qianli Wang, Mingyang Wang, Nils Feldhus, Simon Ostermann, Yuan Cao, Hinrich Schuetze, Sebastian Möller, and Vera Schmitt · Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Trustworthy NLP (TrustNLP 2026) TrustNLP

Dialectal Filtering: Synthesizing Kurdish Corpora for Low-Resource Varieties by Utilizing "Noise" in Large Textual Data

Christian Schuler, Raman Ahmad, Ānrán Wáng, Daniil Gurgurov, Timo Baumann, Simon Ostermann, and Josef van Genabith · Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026) LREC

Common European Language Data Space: Development, Current Status, and Future Perspectives

Stelios Piperidis, Penny Labropoulou, Dimitrios Galanis, Khalid Choukri, Andrejs Vasiļjevs, Mitos Deligiannis, Katerina Gkirtzou, Dimitris Gkoumas, Athanasia Kolovou, Leon Voukoutis, Kanella Pouli, Maria Giagkou, Maria Gavriilidou, Katrin Marheinecke, Elena Leitner, Simon Ostermann, Stefania Raccioppa, Kossay Talmoudi, Victoria Arranz, Valérie Mapelli, Helene Mazo, Fernanda González Campo, Shi Yu, Aivars Bērziņş, Andis Lagzdiņş, and Georg Rehm · Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026) LREC

Assessing Web Search Credibility and Response Groundedness in Chat Assistants

Ivan Vykopal, Matúš Pikuliak, Simon Ostermann, and Marián Šimko · Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) EACL

Language Arithmetics: Towards Systematic Language Neuron Identification and Manipulation

Daniil Gurgurov, Katharina Trinley, Yusser Al Ghussin, Tanja Baeumel, Josef van Genabith, and Simon Ostermann · Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Main) IJCNLP

Modular Arithmetic: Language Models Solve Math Digit by Digit

Tanja Baeumel, Daniil Gurgurov, Yusser al Ghussin, Josef van Genabith, and Simon Ostermann · Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Findings) IJCNLP

Cross-Prompt Encoder for Low-Performing Languages

Beso Mikaberidze, Teimuraz Saghinadze, Simon Ostermann, and Philipp Muller · Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Findings) IJCNLP

Multilingual Political Views of Large Language Models: Identification and Steering

Daniil Gurgurov, Katharina Trinley, Ivan Vykopal, Josef van Genabith, Simon Ostermann, and Roberto Zamparelli · Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Findings) IJCNLP

On Multilingual Encoder Language Model Compression for Low-Resource Languages

Daniil Gurgurov, Michal Gregor, Josef van Genabith, and Simon Ostermann · The 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and The 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Student Research Workshop) IJCNLP-SRW

The Lookahead Limitation: Why Multi-Operand Addition is Hard for LLMs

Tanja Baeumel, Josef van Genabith, and Simon Ostermann · Proceedings of the 8th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP BlackBoxNLP

Disentangling Mathematical Reasoning in LLMs: A Methodological Investigation of Internal Mechanisms

Tanja Baeumel, Josef van Genabith, and Simon Ostermann · Proceedings of The 3rd Workshop on Mathematical Natural Language Processing (MathNLP 2025) MathNLP

Multilingual Datasets for Custom Input Extraction and Explanation Requests Parsing in Conversational XAI Systems

Qianli Wang, Tatiana Anikina, Nils Feldhus, Simon Ostermann, Fedor Splitt, Jiaao Li, Yoana Tsoneva, Sebastian Möller, and Vera Schmitt · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025 EMNLP

Large Language Models for Multilingual Previously Fact-Checked Claim Detection

Ivan Vykopal, Matúš Pikuliak, Simon Ostermann, Tatiana Anikina, Michal Gregor, and Marián Šimko · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025 EMNLP

A Rigorous Evaluation of LLM Data Generation Strategies for Low-Resource Languages

Tatiana Anikina, Jan Cegin, Jakub Simko, and Simon Ostermann · Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Long Papers) EMNLP

FitCF: A Framework for Automatic Feature Importance-guided Counterfactual Example Generation

Qianli Wang, Nils Feldhus, Simon Ostermann, Luis Felipe Villa-Arenas, Sebastian Möller, and Vera Schmitt · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025 ACL

Only for the Unseen Languages, Say the Llamas: On the Efficacy of Language Adapters for Cross-lingual Transfer in English-centric LLMs

Julian Schlenker, Jenny Kunz, Tatiana Anikina, Günter Neumann, and Simon Ostermann · Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop) ACL-SRW

SemEval-2025 Task 7: Multilingual and Crosslingual Fact-Checked Claim Retrieval

Qiwei Peng, Robert Moro, Michal Gregor, Ivan Srba, Simon Ostermann, Marian Simko, Juraj Podrouzek, Matúš Mesarčík, Jaroslav Kopčan, and Anders Søgaard · Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025) SemEval

Small Models, Big Impact: Efficient Corpus and Graph-Based Adaptation of Small Multilingual Language Models for Low-Resource Languages

Daniil Gurgurov, Ivan Vykopal, Josef Van Genabith, and Simon Ostermann · Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop) ACL-SRW

Task Prompt Vectors: Effective Initialization through Multi-Task Soft-Prompt Transfer

Robert Belanec, Simon Ostermann, Ivan Srba, and Maria Bielikova · Accepted at European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD). ECML

Reverse Probing: Evaluating Knowledge Transfer via Finetuned Task Embeddings for Coreference Resolution

Tatiana Anikina, Arne Binder, David Harbecke, Stalin Varanasi, Leonhard Hennig, Simon Ostermann, Sebastian Möller, and Josef Van Genabith · Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2025) Rep4NLP

Cross-Refine: Improving Natural Language Explanation Generation by Learning in Tandem

Qianli Wang, Tatiana Anikina, Nils Feldhus, Simon Ostermann, Sebastian Möller, and Vera Schmitt · Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics Coling

Soft Language Prompts for Language Transfer

Ivan Vykopal, Simon Ostermann, and Marian Simko · Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) NAACL

GrEmLIn: A Repository of Green Baseline Embeddings for 87 Low-Resource Languages Injected with Multilingual Graph Knowledge

Daniil Gurgurov, Rishu Kumar, and Simon Ostermann · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025 NAACL

CoXQL: A Dataset for Parsing Explanation Requests in Conversational XAI Systems

Qianli Wang, Tatiana Anikina, Nils Feldhus, Simon Ostermann, and Sebastian Möller · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 EMNLP

MMAR: Multilingual and Multimodal Anaphora Resolution in Instructional Videos

Cennet Oguz, Pascal Denis, Simon Ostermann, Emmanuel Vincent, Natalia Skachkova, and Josef Van Genabith · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 EMNLP

A Comparison of Different Tokenization Methods for the Georgian Language

Beso Mikaberidze, Temo Saghinadze, Guram Mikaberidze, Raphael Kalandadze, Konstantine Pkhakadze, Josef van Genabith, Simon Ostermann, Lonneke van der Plas, and Philipp Müller · Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Natural Language and Speech Processing (ICNLSP 2024) ICNLSP

Adapting Multilingual LLMs to Low-Resource Languages with Knowledge Graphs via Adapters

Daniil Gurgurov, Mareike Hartmann, and Simon Ostermann · Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models (KaLLM 2024) KaLLM

HybridBERT - Making BERT Pretraining More Efficient Through Hybrid Mixture of Attention Mechanisms

Gokul Srinivasagan and Simon Ostermann · Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop) NAACL-SRW

Common European Language Data Space

Georg Rehm, Stelios Piperidis, Khalid Choukri, Andrejs Vasiļjevs, Katrin Marheinecke, Victoria Arranz, Aivars Bērziņš, Miltos Deligiannis, Dimitris Galanis, Maria Giagkou, Katerina Gkirtzou, Dimitris Gkoumas, Annika Grützner-Zahn, Athanasia Kolovou, Penny Labropoulou, Andis Lagzdiņš, Elena Leitner, Valérie Mapelli, Hélène Mazo, Simon Ostermann, Stefania Racioppa, Mickaël Rigault, and Leon Voukoutis · Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024) Coling

Find-2-Find: Multitask Learning for Anaphora Resolution and Object Localization

Cennet Oguz, Pascal Denis, Emmanuel Vincent, Simon Ostermann, and Josef van Genabith · Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing EMNLP

Investigating the Encoding of Words in BERT's Neurons Using Feature Textualization

Tanja Baeumel, Soniya Vijayakumar, Josef van Genabith, Guenter Neumann, and Simon Ostermann · Proceedings of the 6th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP BlackBoxNLP

Script Knowledge for Natural Language Understanding

Simon Ostermann · Saarländische Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Thesis

Commonsense Inference in Natural Language Processing (COIN) - Shared Task Report

Simon Ostermann, Sheng Zhang, Michael Roth, and Peter Clark · Proceedings of the First Workshop on Commonsense Inference in Natural Language Processing COIN

MCScript2.0: A Machine Comprehension Corpus Focused on Script Events and Participants

Simon Ostermann, Michael Roth, and Manfred Pinkal · Proceedings of the Eighth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2019) *SEM

SemEval-2018 Task 11: Machine Comprehension Using Commonsense Knowledge

Simon Ostermann, Michael Roth, Ashutosh Modi, Stefan Thater, and Manfred Pinkal · Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation SemEval

MCScript: A Novel Dataset for Assessing Machine Comprehension Using Script Knowledge

Simon Ostermann, Ashutosh Modi, Michael Roth, Stefan Thater, and Manfred Pinkal · Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018) LREC

Mapping Texts to Scripts: An Entailment Study

Simon Ostermann, Hannah Seitz, Stefan Thater, and Manfred Pinkal · Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018) LREC

Aligning Script Events with Narrative Texts

Simon Ostermann, Michael Roth, Stefan Thater, and Manfred Pinkal · Proceedings of the 6th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2017) *SEM

InScript: Narrative texts annotated with script information

Ashutosh Modi, Tatjana Anikina, Simon Ostermann, and Manfred Pinkal · Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16) LREC

Annotating Entailment Relations for Shortanswer Questions

Simon Ostermann, Andrea Horbach, and Manfred Pinkal · Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications NLP-TEA

Paraphrase Detection for Short Answer Scoring

Nikolina Koleva, Andrea Horbach, Alexis Palmer, Simon Ostermann, and Manfred Pinkal · Proceedings of the third workshop on NLP for computer-assisted language learning NLP4CALL