Welcome!

I am a researcher and engineer in Natural Language Processing at bettermarks and the University of Tübingen.

I am interested in Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning, Content Assessment (sometimes called Automated Short Answer Grading) and computational approaches to Information Structure. To find out more about the latter two, I worked in the CoMiC project on automatic meaning evaluation of student answers to reading comprehension questions, tying in information structure with shallow semantic analysis. After completing my PhD thesis, I started working on transferring my research into an Intelligent Language Tutoring System called FeedBook. After that, I was PI of the ISAAC project, where I pursued the transfer and integration of Content Assessment into real-life language testing and tutoring systems.

Since September 2021, I am working at bettermarks as Senior NLP Engineer and tech lead on an Intelligent Tutoring System for German.

Publications

2019

Detmar Meurers, Kordula De Kuthy, Florian Nuxoll, Björn Rudzewitz, and Ramon Ziai. KI zur Lösung realer Schulherausforderungen: Interaktive und adaptive Materialien im Fach Englisch. Schulmanagement-Handbuch, 169:65--89, 2019. [ bib ]

Detmar Meurers, Kordula De Kuthy, Florian Nuxoll, Björn Rudzewitz, and Ramon Ziai. Scaling up intervention studies to investigate real-life foreign language learning in school. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 39:161--188, 2019. [ bib | http ]

Björn Rudzewitz, Ramon Ziai, Florian Nuxoll, Kordula De Kuthy, and Detmar Meurers. Enhancing a web-based language tutoring system with learning analytics. In Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on Learning Analytics: Building bridges between the Education and the Computing communities (LABBEC) held at Educational Data Mining (EDM) 2019, Montréal, Canada, 2019. [ bib | .pdf ]

Ramon Ziai, Florian Nuxoll, Kordula De Kuthy, Björn Rudzewitz, and Detmar Meurers. The impact of spelling correction and task context on short answer assessment for intelligent tutoring systems. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on NLP for Computer Assisted Language Learning, pages 93--99, Turku, Finland, September 2019. ACL. [ bib | .pdf ]

2018

Ramon Ziai and Detmar Meurers. Automatic focus annotation: Bringing formal pragmatics alive in analyzing the Information Structure of authentic data. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT), pages 117--128, New Orleans, LA, 2018. ACL. [ bib | .pdf ]

Ramon Ziai. Short Answer Assessment in Context: The Role of Information Structure. PhD thesis, Faculty of Humanities, University of Tübingen, 2018. [ bib | http ]

Detmar Meurers, Kordula De Kuthy, Verena Möller, Florian Nuxoll, Björn Rudzewitz, and Ramon Ziai. Digitale Differenzierung benötigt Informationen zu Sprache, Aufgabe und Lerner. Zur Generierung von individuellem Feedback in einem interaktiven Arbeitsheft [Digitial differentiation requires information on language, task, and learner. On the generation of individual feedback in an interactive workbook]. FLuL -- Fremdsprachen Lehren und Lernen, 47(2):64--82, 2018. [ bib ]

Björn Rudzewitz, Ramon Ziai, Kordula De Kuthy, Verena Möller, Florian Nuxoll, and Detmar Meurers. Generating feedback for English foreign language exercises. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA), pages 127--136. ACL, 2018. [ bib | .pdf ]

Ramon Ziai, Björn Rudzewitz, Kordula De Kuthy, Florian Nuxoll, and Detmar Meurers. Feedback strategies for form and meaning in a real-life language tutoring system. In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (NLP4CALL). Association for Computational Linguistics, 2018. [ bib ]

2017

Björn Rudzewitz, Ramon Ziai, Kordula De Kuthy, and Detmar Meurers. Developing a web-based workbook for english supporting the interaction of students and teachers. In Proceedings of the Joint 6th Workshop on NLP for Computer Assisted Language Learning and 2nd Workshop on NLP for Research on Language Acquisition at NoDaLiDa 2017, Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 134, pages 36--46. ACL, 2017. [ bib | .pdf ]

2016

Kordula De Kuthy, Ramon Ziai, and Detmar Meurers. Focus annotation of task-based data: a comparison of expert and crowd-sourced annotation in a reading comprehension corpus. In Proceedings of the 10th Edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), pages 3928--3934, Portorož, Slovenia, 2016. ACL. [ bib | http ]

Ramon Ziai, Kordula De Kuthy, and Detmar Meurers. Approximating Givenness in Content Assessment through Distributional Semantics. In Proceedings of the Fifth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM), pages 209--218, Berlin, Germany, 2016. ACL. [ bib | .pdf ]

Kordula De Kuthy, Ramon Ziai, and Detmar Meurers. Focus annotation of task-based data: Establishing the quality of crowd annotation. In Proceedings of the 10th Linguistic Annotation Workshop held in conjunction with ACL 2016 (LAW-X 2016), pages 110--119, Berlin, Germany, 2016. ACL. [ bib | .pdf ]

2015

Björn Rudzewitz and Ramon Ziai. CoMiC: Adapting a short answer assessment system for answer selection. In Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2015), pages 247--251. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2015. [ bib | http ]

Ramon Ziai and Björn Rudzewitz. CoMiC: Exploring text segmentation and similarity in the English Entrance Exams task. In Linda Cappellato, Nicola Ferro, Gareth J. F. Jones, and Eric San Juan, editors, Working Notes of CLEF 2015 -- Conference and Labs of the Evaluation forum, volume 1391 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2015. [ bib | .pdf ]

Kordula De Kuthy, Ramon Ziai, and Detmar Meurers. Learning what the crowd can do: A case study on focus annotation. In Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Quantitative Investigations in Theoretical Linguistics. Universität Tübingen, 2015. [ bib | http ]

2014

Derrick Higgins, Chris Brew, Michael Heilman, Ramon Ziai, Lei Chen, Aoife Cahill, Michael Flor, Nitin Madnani, Joel R. Tetreault, Daniel Blanchard, Diane Napolitano, Chong Min Lee, and John Blackmore. Is getting the right answer just about choosing the right words? the role of syntactically-informed features in short answer scoring. Computation and Language, 2014. [ bib | arXiv | http ]

Albert Wall, Niels Ott, Ramon Ziai, and Björn Rudzewitz. Macunaíma as a data source for the distribution and interpretation of bare NPs in Brazilian Portuegese: Corpus preparation and first annotation agreement results. Poster at the Third International Conference on Ibero-Romance Historical Corpora (CODILI 3), 6 2014. [ bib | http ]

Ramon Ziai and Detmar Meurers. Focus annotation in reading comprehension data. In Proceedings of the 8th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW VIII, 2014), pages 159--168, Dublin, Ireland, 2014. COLING, Association for Computational Linguistics. [ bib | .pdf ]

2013

Niels Ott, Ramon Ziai, Michael Hahn, and Detmar Meurers. CoMeT: Integrating different levels of linguistic modeling for meaning assessment. In Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval), pages 608--616, Atlanta, GA, 2013. Association for Computational Linguistics. [ bib | .pdf ]

2012

Niels Ott, Ramon Ziai, and Detmar Meurers. Creation and analysis of a reading comprehension exercise corpus: Towards evaluating meaning in context. In Thomas Schmidt and Kai Wörner, editors, Multilingual Corpora and Multilingual Corpus Analysis, Hamburg Studies in Multilingualism (HSM), pages 47--69. Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2012. [ bib | .html ]

Ramon Ziai, Niels Ott, and Detmar Meurers. Short answer assessment: Establishing links between research strands. In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA-7) at NAACL-HLT 2012, pages 190--200, Montreal, June 2012. ACL. [ bib | .pdf ]

2011

Luiz Amaral, Detmar Meurers, and Ramon Ziai. Analyzing learner language: Towards a flexible NLP architecture for intelligent language tutors. Computer-Assisted Language Learning, 24(1):1--16, 2011. [ bib | .html ]

Detmar Meurers, Ramon Ziai, Niels Ott, and Stacey Bailey. Integrating parallel analysis modules to evaluate the meaning of answers to reading comprehension questions. IJCEELL. Special Issue on Automatic Free-text Evaluation, 21(4):355--369, 2011. [ bib | .html ]

Detmar Meurers, Ramon Ziai, Niels Ott, and Janina Kopp. Evaluating answers to reading comprehension questions in context: Results for German and the role of information structure. In Proceedings of the TextInfer 2011 Workshop on Textual Entailment, pages 1--9, Edinburgh, July 2011. ACL. [ bib | .pdf ]

Johannes Widmann, Kurt Kohn, and Ramon Ziai. The SACODEYL search tool -- exploiting corpora for language learning purposes. In Ana Frankenberg-Garcia, Lynne Flowerdew, and Guy Aston, editors, New Trends in Corpora and Language Learning, volume 14 of Corpora and Discourse, chapter 10, pages 167--178. Continuum International Publishing Group, London and New York, 2011. [ bib ]

2010

Detmar Meurers, Niels Ott, and Ramon Ziai. Compiling a task-based corpus for the analysis of learner language in context. In Pre-Proceedings of Linguistic Evidence, pages 214--217, Tübingen, 2010. [ bib | .html ]

Detmar Meurers, Ramon Ziai, Luiz Amaral, Adriane Boyd, Aleksandar Dimitrov, Vanessa Metcalf, and Niels Ott. Enhancing authentic web pages for language learners. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA-5) at NAACL-HLT 2010, pages 10--18, Los Angeles, 2010. [ bib | .pdf ]

Niels Ott and Ramon Ziai. Evaluating dependency parsing performance on German learner language. In Markus Dickinson, Kaili Müürisep, and Marco Passarotti, editors, Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories, volume 9 of NEALT Proceeding Series, pages 175--186, 2010. [ bib | http ]

2009

Ramon Ziai. A flexible annotation-based architecture for intelligent language tutoring systems. Master's thesis, Universität Tübingen, Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft, April 2009. [ bib | .pdf ]

Contact Me

Address:
Wilhelmstr. 19 / 1.25
72074 Tübingen

Phone: +49 7071 29-73962
E-mail: ramon.ziai ät uni dash tuebingen dot de