Projects

Enhancing a German Dialect Corpus with Neural Methods

Master Thesis
In my master thesis I used Transformer models to add additional information to a German written dialect corpus.
Leveraging these systems I showed how to collect new dialect data on Twitter.
Moreover, I performed socio-linguistic analyses demonstrating how socio-demographic factors influence dialectality.

Cross-lingual gender prediction

Project Paper
In this project two classification systems for gender prediction across different languages were implemented.
One system was based on linguistic features the other on a LLM (XLM-RoBERTa).
Leveraging these systems we tried to predict the gender of Twitter users from their tweets.

Plutchik Vectors for Emotion Classification

Project Paper
Building on Plutchik’s model of emotions I created a task-specific optimization function.
This allowed for emotion-tuning of word embeddings during training.
The project aimed for improving performance of an emotion classification task on the AffectiveText corpus.

Speech enhancement with an LMS adaptive filter

Project Paper
In this project I implemented a simple Least Mean Squares adaptive filter.
Its effectiveness was tested in an echo cancellation scenario.

Die Entstehung des bairischen Verbalpräfixes der- und dessen synchrone Verwendung in den südbairischen Dialekten Südtirols

Bachelor Thesis
One of the most prominent and widely-used verbal prefixes in the South Tyrolean dialect (as well as other Bavarian varieties) is der-. Besides many other meanings, der- also has developed der- a modal component of meaning, which expresses that something is possible or not possible for the agent. In my Bachelor thesis I described this linguistic phenomenon and its syntactical and semantic conspicuities in the South Tyrolean dialect.