Steffen Eger

About me:

I am a Heisenberg grant recipient of the DFG, leading the Natural Language Learning Group (NLLG) at Bielefeld UniversityUniversity of Mannheim, Germany, which is additionally funded by the BMBF through an interdisciplinary AI research group "Metrics4NLG". Previously, I was Interim Professor at Bielefeld University, substituting Philipp Cimiano in the Semantic Computing Group and Junior Research Group Leader (IRGL) at TU Darmstadt. I obtained my PhD in economics on the topic of Social Learning/Opinion Dynamics.

My research interests include Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning, and applications in the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences. I am particularly interested in

  • evaluation metrics (for text generation) and text generation
  • applications in the Social Sciences and Digital Humanities, e.g., change of social biases over time, detection of social solidarity, poetry (generation/evaluation), cross-temporal approaches (language change), cross-linguality, argumentation
Earlier research interests included alignments, opinion dynamics (in a social science/economic context) as well as applications in math (such as integer compositions and limits of powers of matrices).

Email: steffen.eger(at)uni-mannheim.de
Google Scholar | Github | Twitter |



This page is not actively maintained. For up to date information, check my group's page

News

Selected Recent Publications

  • Measuring Social Solidarity during Crisis: The Role of Design Choices
    Steffen Eger, Dan Liu, Alexandra Grunow
    Journal of Social Computing (JoSoCo), 2022
    [paper]
  • Global Explainability of BERT-based Evaluation Metrics by Disentangling along Linguistic Factors
    Marvin Kaster, Wei Zhao, Steffen Eger
    EMNLP, 2021
    [paper]
  • The Eval4NLP Shared Task on Explainable Quality Estimation: Overview and Results
    Marina Fomicheva, Piyawat Lertvittayakumjorn, Wei Zhao, Steffen Eger, Yang Gao
    Eval4NLP, 2021
    [paper]
  • Diachronic Analysis of German Parliamentary Proceedings: Ideological Shifts through the Lens of Political Biases
    Tobias Walter, Celina Kirschner, Steffen Eger, Goran Glavaš, Anne Lauscher, Simone Paolo Ponzetto
    JCDL, 2021
    [paper]
  • BERT-Defense: A Probabilistic Model Based on BERT to Combat Cognitively Inspired Orthographic Adversarial Attacks
    Yannik Keller, Jan Mackensen, Steffen Eger
    ACL, 2021
    [paper]
  • Better than Average: Paired Evaluation of NLP systems
    Maxime Peyrard, Wei Zhao, Steffen Eger, Robert West
    ACL, 2021
    [paper]
  • Changes in European Solidarity Before and During COVID-19: Evidence from a Large Crowd- and Expert-Annotated Twitter Dataset
    Alexandra Ils, Dan Liu, Alexandra Grunow, Steffen Eger
    ACL, 2021
    [paper]
  • From Hero to Zéroe: A Benchmark of Low-Level Adversarial Attacks
    Steffen Eger, Yannik Benz
    AACL, 2020
    [paper]
  • How to Probe Sentence Embeddings in Low-Resource Languages: On Structural Design Choices for Probing Task Evaluation
    Steffen Eger, Johannes Daxenberger, Iryna Gurevych
    CONLL, 2020
    [paper]
  • On the Limitations of Cross-lingual Encoders as Exposed by Reference-Free Machine Translation Evaluation
    Wei Zhao, Goran Glavaš, Maxime Peyrard, Yang Gao, Robert West, Steffen Eger
    ACL, 2020
    [paper]
  • SUPERT: Towards New Frontiers in Unsupervised Evaluation Metrics for Multi-Document Summarization
    Yang Gao, Wei Zhao, Steffen Eger
    ACL, 2020
    [paper]
  • PO-EMO: Conceptualization, annotation, and modeling of aesthetic emotions in German and English poetry
    Thomas Haider, Steffen Eger, Evgeny Kim, Roman Klinger, Winfried Menninghaus
    LREC, 2020
    [paper]
  • MoverScore: Text Generation Evaluating with Contextualized Embeddings and Earth Mover Distance
    Wei Zhao, Maxime Peyrard, Fei Liu, Yang Gao, Christian M. Meyer, Steffen Eger
    EMNLP, 2019
    [paper]
  • Text processing like humans do: Visually Attacking and Shielding NLP systems
    Steffen Eger, Gözde Gül Sahin, Andreas Rückle, Ji-Ung Lee, Claudia Schulz, Mohsen Mesgar, Krishnkant Swarnkar, Edwin Simpson, Iryna Gurevych
    NAACL, 2019
    [paper]
  • Does my rebuttal matter? Insights from a major NLP conference
    Yang Gao, Steffen Eger, Ilia Kuznetsov, Iryna Gurevych
    NAACL, 2019
    [paper]

Teaching