Niko Schenk

Computational Linguist

I am a computational linguist and work as a Language Engineer at Amazon.

Before that, I was as a postdoctoral researcher in Natural Language Processing at the Applied Computational Linguistics Lab / Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany.

Research areas:
• Machine/Deep Learning in NLP
• Shallow Discourse Parsing (PDTB-/CDTB-style)
• Implicit Semantic Role Labeling (PropBank/NomBank/FrameNet)
• Text Summarization and Text Generation
• Sentiment/Opinion Mining and Subjectivity Analysis

Besides my own research, I serve as a member of various program committees for the major NLP conferences, e.g., ACL2019/ACL2019, EMNLP2018/-IJCNLP'19, LREC2018, SIGDIAL2017/2018/2019, ...

View my CV & Publications

Résumé

Experience

  • October 2020 - Present

    Amazon, Berlin, Germany

    Language Engineer

  • April 2013 - Present

    Department of Computer Science & English and American Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany

    Postdoctoral Researcher (PhD Candidate until 2019)

    • Set up a server infrastructure for corpus linguistic research.
    • Involved in academic organization, grant applications, teaching (Corpus Linguistics & NLP), advising of students (B.A./M.A. Theses).

  • July 2019 - September 2019

    Google, Zurich, Switzerland

    Computational Linguist Intern

    • Developed a topic tracking framework for dialog systems.

  • October 2010 - March 2011

    SONY Deutschland GmbH, Stuttgart Technology Center, Speech & Sound Group

    Software Development Intern

    • Development of a web crawler for online reviews and implementation of a multi-language sentiment analysis program.
    • Prototype development of a GUI and annotation guidelines for sentiment annotation.
    • Successful patent grant

  • August 2009 - January 2010

    IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH, Text Analysis, Information Management

    Software Development Intern

    • Development of a pattern-based linguistic component for sentiment analysis + integration into IBM product: primarily, based on user-generated content from social media, forums, message boards, blogs.

Education

Skills

I am familiar with a wide range of programming and scripting languages including Java, Python, and R. I have knowledge in employing deep learning (Transformer-based architectures, CNNs, LSTM models) to complex natural language processing tasks such as discourse parsing or natural language inference. In particular, I have developed open source software using theano, keras, deeplearing4j, and huggingface transformers. Beyond that, I have set up web applications with Google Web Toolkit, ZK, and RESTful Web Services using JAX-RS.

  • Linguistic Modeling
  • Classical NLP
  • Evaluation & Model Training
  • Deep Learning
  • Text Summarization & Generation
  • Opinion Mining

Get In Touch

n.schenkem.uni-frankfurt.de

Affiliations:

Fachbereich Neuere Philologien
Institut für England- und Amerikastudien, Abteilung Linguistik
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main / Campus Westend
Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1, IG-Farben Haus, Raum: 3.216
60629 Frankfurt am Main


Fachbereich Informatik und Mathematik
Institut für Informatik, Angewandte Computerlinguistik
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main / Campus Bockenheim
Robert-Mayer-Str. 11-15, Raum: 109
60325 Frankfurt am Main