News
First Professorial Appointment for Researcher from CATALPA
[25.08.2023]Since the beginning of April this year, CATALPA member Andrea Horbach has been the new assistant professor for digital humanities at the University of Hildesheim. She is the first CATALPA junior researcher to have been offered a professorship. After spending a few weeks settling in, the researcher is already working on new project ideas. The computational linguist will remain with our research center as head of the EduNLP junior research group. In this interview, she talks about her first months in her new job.
Photo: Henrik Schipper
New city, new tasks – how have you been and how well have you settled in to your new position, Andrea?
I’m actually still in the middle of my induction phase and still in the process of setting myself up. Last semester, I held my first lecture here in Hildesheim on AI for educational applications. Right now, I’m preparing for the new semester and also looking for assistants and theses to supervise. I’ve already hired a doctoral researcher who will be starting on 15 September. Having new staff on board will enable me to plan my research work more precisely within the framework of the professorship.
In respect of your specialization, how are you positioned within the University of Hildesheim?
Hildesheim is a former university of education and is still important for teacher training. At the Department for Information Science and Natural Language Processing, there are many links to my research on the topic of EduNLP (Educational Natural Language Processing). For instance, in collaboration with my colleague Johanna Fleckenstein, who is a junior professor for digital teaching and learning at the Institute of Educational Sciences, I am currently looking at how the methods we have developed for our research on automated scoring can be implemented for pupils in schools.
Does this focus on scholastic rather than higher education change anything for your work?
In school settings, other linguistic aspects play a role. For example, the requirements are different for schoolchildren who have just started to learn a new foreign language than those for university students who have to solve a task for their degree course. However, the tools and methods we use to automatically evaluate differing writing tasks like these are essentially the same.
Before you got offered the professorship in Hildesheim, you were head of the junior research group EduNLP at CATALPA and continue to do so as an associate researcher. How has this experience helped you?
More than anything else, the experience has given me confidence. I knew that it had given me the opportunity to try out and successfully implement many of the things that were going to be expected of me in my new position. For example, I had already developed my own research agenda and supervised doctoral researchers. It’s also great that the change hasn’t caused any “dip” in my scientific output. Thanks to my role as the leader of the junior research group and my collaboration with Torsten Zesch’s group, I have been able to continue working on publications. And, of course, I’m delighted that I will be staying connected with CATALPA, not just via the junior research group but also, for example, in the BMBF joint project KISS-PRO, in which both CATALPA and Hildesheim are partners. It’s the special structure of the research center, which keeps the doors open for researchers with associations and collaborations, that makes this possible.
