• natural language processing for the biomedical domain (BioNLP)
• biochemical terminology
• constraint logic programming and modeling

I am a PhD-student at the SDBV group at EML Research and at the Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS) at the University of Stuttgart. Before that I studied Computational Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Heidelberg.

My PhD project is about processing names of chemical compounds. This is an important aspect for text retrieval, information extraction and database curation in the biomedical domain. Both mapping (identification, grounding) and classification of these names are necessary. Name characteristics like synonymy and underspecification complicate these tasks. For comprehensive processing, the names' meanings, i.e. the molecular structures, need to be taken into account. Our method is to automatically model a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) for each given name-to-structure task. The solutions to these CSPs are the corresponding chemical structure(s) for a name. These solutions, or a CSP in case of an underspecifying or class name, can be used for mapping and chemical classification.

Publications

• Member of the Executive Committee at the Interdisciplinary College 2010.
• Organisation of the Poster Session at the Interdisciplinary College 2009 together with Berenike Loos and Vanessa Micelli.