Dr. Ivan Habernal

Head of the group

My current research areas include legal argument mining, privacy-preserving NLP, and explainable and trustworthy models. My research track spans argument mining and computational argumentation, crowdsourcing, large-scale corpora, serious games, sentiment and sarcasm on social media, and semantic web.

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Doctoral candidates

Lena Held, MSc.

Ph.D. student

Lena is currently exploring the research area of computational argumentation in the legal domain.

Timour Igamberdiev, M.A.

Ph.D. student

Timour's current research areas include privacy-preserving NLP, differential privacy in graph neural networks, and privacy-preserving semantic representations of language.

Master and Bachelor students

Christopher Weiss

Master thesis

Chris's thesis focuses on finding best practices on how to optimally adapt the concept of differential privacy in NLP environments while putting the needs of the end-users first and considering perceptional biases to make differential privacy more accessible.

Alumni

Lijie Hu

2022, Research internship

Lijie is a second-year PhD student in Computer Science at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. Her research interests cover machine learning algorithm on Explainable AI (XAI), Differential Privacy, and Differential Private Natural Language Models. She is also interested in Machine Unlearning, and other security issues in data field.

Sudarshan Sivakumar

2022, Research internship Sudarshan is an undergraduate student in Computer Science from India. His primary research interest is in creating language processing tools that are socially and ethically responsible. He is working on a research project related to differentially private synthetic data generation.

Nina Mouhammad

2022, Master thesis

Nina wrote her thesis on privacy-preserving techniques for crowdsourcing sensitive text data.

Johanna Frenz

2022, Bachelor thesis

Johanna studied computer science at TU Darmstadt. In her bachelor thesis, she compiled an easily accessible legal benchmark dataset to enable evaluating models on a variety of legal NLP tasks.

Lars Wolf

2022, Master thesis

Lars, student of information systems technologies, cooperated with political scientists to identify indoctrination in German history textbooks through entity emotion analysis.

Ying Yin

2022, Master thesis

Ying explored privacy-preserving transformer models in the legal domain. Her thesis combined large-scale pre-training with differential privacy and evaluates the trade-off between privacy-preserving capability and downstream performance.

Sarah Lettmann

2021, Master thesis

Sarah explored ethical argumentation in scientific literature. Her thesis focused on controversial technologies and automatic mining of absent, shifting, and evolving ethical arguments.

Manuel Senge

2021, Bachelor thesis

Manuel was a bachelor's student at the TU Darmstadt focusing on machine learning. He wrote his thesis on the effectiveness and impact on accuracy using differential privacy in NLP.

Lena Held

2021, Master thesis

Lena studied computer science at TU Darmstadt. In her thesis she dealt with differentially private language representation learning.

Daniel Faber

2021, Master thesis

Daniel explored legal argument mining in court decisions with focus on ECHR decisions and their art of argumentation in regard to their importance level.

Fabian Kaiser, M.Sc.

2020-2021, TU Darmstadt research Scholarship

Fabian's research area included legal argument mining, expert annotations, and low-resource and few-shot transfer learning for annotation recommendations.