Research

Research Interests

Digital Transformation in Education
Writing Technology
Writing processes
Document Engineering
(Computational) morphology
Interactive NLP applications
Human-Computer-Interaction
Assessment

Current Research Projects

Dialectics of Cybernetically Motivated Transformation of Teaching and Learning

Past Research Projects

PI in the project Linguistische Einheiten im Schreibprozess. Systematische Untersuchung von Planungs- und Redigiereinheiten at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg (WBK) of the University of Bern (funded by the WBK as Junior Fellowship) 2017.
Senior Researcher in the joint research project Verwertung Geist at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim 2015/2016.
Coordinator of the Leibniz ScienceCampus Empirical Linguistics and Computational Language Modeling, a cooperation between the Institut für Deutsche Sprache and the Institute for Computational Linguistics at the Rupprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg 2015.
Coordinator of the CLARIN-D center at the IMS in Stuttgart 2014/2015.
With Michael Piotrowski I worked in the project Linguistically Supported Revising and Editing. You find more information on the project website.
Senior researcher in the project Sprichwörter und Redewendungen im Wandel. Online-Lexikon zur diachronen Phraseologie (OLdPhras) (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, University of Basel) 2010–2013.
PI in the project Dynamische Erstellung personalisierter Lehrmaterialien (funded by Initiative Interaktives Lernen, University of Zurich) 2006/2007.
Researcher in the project TransTech – Language Technology for Translators (funded by Swiss Virtual Campus (SVC)) 2005/2006. See the project website. Leading House was Ecole de traduction et d’interprétation (ETI) at the University of Geneva, collaborators were the Institut für Übersetzen und Dolmetschen (IUED) of the University of Applied Sciences Zurich (ZHAW) and Star AG.
Research assistant in the project Umstellung der Grundausbildung im Fach Computerlinguistik auf netzbasierte Instruktionsmittel (WebCL) (funded by University of Zurich) 2001–2003.

Permalink: http://mahlow.ch/research/
Last Saved: March 8th, 2019

News: Talks, Publications, Activities

The publicly availability of AI-based automated text production in late November 2022, first in ChatGPT and later in various writing tools called for a lot of talks, inputs, workshops, interviews, panels for the first half of 2023. In the second half of 2023 I will give even more talks: for the FARI Conference in September in Brussels and for the conference Litigation PR in November in Winterthur.

For the workshop in2Writing (co-located with SIGCHI in April in Hamburg) I wrote a position paper: Writing Tools: Looking Back to Look Ahead. I argue new writing tools to be inspired by "failed" projects from the 1970s and 1980s.

End of May, GPP is coming to Switzerland! On May 22, 2023, we welcomed GPP VT 2023 at ZHAW. In person!

It was my last in conference before the pandemic and it will be the first conference I wanted to attend in person: XMLPrague 2022. I gave a talk on "Structure! You get more than you see"

End of May, GPP is coming to Switzerland! On May 23, 2022, we welcomed GPP VT 2022 at ZHAW. In person!

Our paper, Extraction of Transforming Sequences and Sentence Histories from Writing Process Data: A First Step Towards Linguistic Modeling of Writing with Anna Ulasik and Don Tuggener has been published Open Access in the special issue on Methods for understanding writing process by analysis of writing timecourse in Reading and Writing [DOI]

I moved my blog Academic Adventures from blogger to a self-hosted pico installation. Check out the new and old posts here!

End of May, it's GPP time! On May 26, 2021, we welcomed GPP VT 2021 at ZHAW. Only virtually, but we all enjoyed it and hope for a real campus tour next May. Have a look at the Global Perspectives Program from Virginia Tech.

We are part of a project on Digital literacy in university contexts (DigLit) funded by swissuniversities from 2021 to 2024.

In December 2019, I have been elected member of the Advisory Board of the German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology (GSCL).

I have been awarded a fellowship to work on Writing Technology for the 21st Century in the context of the Digitization Initiative of the Zurich-area Universities (DIZH) in 2020.

In December 2019, I have been appointed Professor of Digital Linguistics by the Council of Zürcher Fachhochschule (ZFH).

Since September 2019, I co-head the Digital Linguistics lab at the School of Applied Linguistics of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences.

In May 2019, I joined the team focusing on Higher Education Pedagogy at the Center of University Continuing Education at the University of Bern.

In Spring term 2018, I taught an introductory course on Digital Humanities (see description in German) at the University of Bern.

Since mid September 2017, I'm back to E-Learning! I joined the team "Hochschuldidaktik & E-Learning" at the Bern University of Applied Sciences.

In Fall term 2017, I was a Fellow of the Walter Benjamin Kolleg at the University of Bern.

We moved back to Switzerland in Spring 2017!

In Winter term 2016/2017, I was a Guest Professor at the Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS) at the University of Stuttgart. I taught courses on grammar engineering, computational morphology and NLP for writing processes.

In 2016 I have been appointed member of the Steering Committee of the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng).

My paper C-WEP—Rich Annotated Collection of Writing Errors by Professionals has been accepted for LREC 2016, get it here. The error collection is available from the LingURed website.

The chapter Learning from Errors: Systematic Analysis of Complex Writing Errors for Improving Writing Technology I wrote for the Festschrift for Michael Zock has been published. It is available electronically. However, I rather recommend my final version available from the list of publications, as the layout in the published version is messy and misleading.

Academic Adventures (Blog)

https://academic-adventures.ch