Our group includes PostDocs, PhD students, and student assistants, and is headed by Prof. Felix Naumann. If you are interested in joining our team, please contact Felix Naumann.
For bachelor students we offer German lectures on database systems in addition to paper- or project-oriented seminars. Within a one-year bachelor project, students finalize their studies in cooperation with external partners. For master students we offer courses on information integration, data profiling, and information retrieval enhanced by specialized seminars, master projects and we advise master theses.
Most of our research is conducted in the context of larger research projects, in collaboration across students, across groups, and across universities. We strive to make available most of our datasets and source code.
Knowledge Base Population and Question Answering Systems
Education
2007 - 2011 PhD student in Computer Science at the partnership for research and education (PIRE) Meaning Representations in Language Understanding at Saarland University, Saarbrucken, Germany. German Research Foundation (DFG) scholarship.
2009 Visiting Researcher at CLSP lab. of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA.
2005 - 2007 Master of Science in Computer Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran
2001 - 2005 Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran
2000 - 2001 Pre-University in Mathematics and Physics at Maryam Pre-University, Saveh, Iran
Teaching
Lecturer at Hasso-Plattner-Institut, Potsdam, Germany
WS 2011/12: Fabian Lindenberg - Master Student - "Generating Query Suggestions by Exploiting Latent Semantics in Query Logs"
SS 2012: Michael Leben - Master Student - "Automated Email Foldering Using Contextual Features"
at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany
SS 2010: Farina Freigang – Master Student - "Language Modeling for In-car ASR Error Correction: Performance vs. Interaction Costs"
SS 2008: Joo-Eun Feit – Bachelor Student - Opinion Sentence Annotation for Question Answering Systems
Professional Activities
Program Committee
IEEE International Conference on Computational Linguistics Applications (CLA), 2010-present.
Elsevier International Journal of Information Systems (IS), 2011-present.
Reviewing Committee
Erasmus Mundus European Master Program in Language and Communication Technology (LCT), Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2008-2011.
Master Program in Language Science and Technology (LST), Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2010.
Head of Scientific Student Chapter Department of Computer Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, 2005
Publications
Journal Papers
M. Ghayoomi, S. Momtazi, M. Bijnkhan "A Study of Corpus Development for Persian" pdf International Journal of Asian Language Processing, 20(1): 17-33, 2010.
Thesises:
S. Momtazi "Advanced Language Modeling for Sentence Retrieval and Classification in Question Answering Systems"online version PhD Thesis, Computer Science Department, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2010.
S. Momtazi "Fuzzy Word Clustering for Building Statistical Language Models in Continuous Speech Recognition Systems" M.Sc. Thesis, Computer Engineering Department, Sharif University Of Technology, Tehran, Iran, 2007.
S. Momtazi, M. Fazel-Zarandi "Robust Parsing for Word Lattices in Continuous Speech Recognition Systems" B.Sc. Thesis, Computer Engineering Department, Sharif University Of Technology, Tehran, Iran, 2005.
Conference and Workshop Papers
M. Felde, S. Momtazi, F. Freigang, D. Klakow, C. Muller "Mobile Texting: Can Post-ASR Correction Solve the Issues? An Experimental Study on Gain vs. Costs" Proceedings of International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), Lisbon, Portugal, 2012 (to appear)
S. Momtazi "Fine-grained German Sentiment Analysis on Social Media" Proceedings of International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Istanbul, Turkey, 2012 (to appear)
S. Momtazi, D. Klakow "Trained Trigger Language Model for Sentence Retrieval in QA: Bridging the Vocabulary Gap" Proceedings of International ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Glasgow, UK, 2011.
G. Chrupala, S. Momtazi, M. Wiegand, S. Kazalski, F. Xu, B. Roth, A. Balahur, D. Klakow "Saarland University Spoken Language Systems at the Slot Filling Task of TAC KBP 2010" pdf Proceedings of International Text Analysis Conference (TAC), NIST Campus, Maryland, USA, 2010.
S. Momtazi, F. Faubel, D. Klakow "Within and Across Sentence Boundary Language Model" pdf Proceedings of International IEEE INTERSPEECH Conference, Makuhari, Japan, 2010.
S. Momtazi, M. Lease, D. Klakow "Effective Term Weighting for Sentence Retrieval" pdf Proceedings of European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL), Glasgow, UK, 2010.
S. Momtazi, D. Klakow "Hierarchical Pitman-Yor Language Model for Information Retrieval" pdf Proceedings of International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Geneva, Switzerland, 2010.
S. Momtazi, S. Khudanpur, D. Klakow "A Comparative Study on Word Co-occurrence for Term Clustering in Language Model-based Sentence Retrieval" pdf Proceedings of International Conference of North American Association of Computational Linguistics (NAACL), Los Angeles, USA, 2010.
S. Momtazi, D. Klakow "Yahoo! Answers for Sentence Retrieval in Question Answering" pdf Proceedings of the LREC Workshop on Web Logs and Question Answering, Valletta, Malta, 2010.
S. Momtazi, D. Klakow "A Word Clustering Approach for Language Model-based Sentence Retrieval in Question Answering Systems" pdf Proceedings of International ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Hong Kong, China, 2009.
S. Momtazi, D. Klakow "Language Model-Based Sentence Classification for Opinion Question Answering Systems" pdf Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Computer Science and Information Technology - Computational Linguistics Applications (CLA), Mragowo, Poland, 2009.
S. Momtazi, S. Kazalski, D. Klakow "A Combined Query Expansion Technique for Retrieving Opinions from Blogs" pdf Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Intelligent System Design and Applications (ISDA), Pisa, Italy, 2009.
S. Momtazi, H. Sameti "A Possibilistic Approach in Word Clustering for Building Statistical Language Models" pdf Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Intelligent System Design and Applications (ISDA), Pisa, Italy, 2009.
M. Ghayoomi, S. Momtazi "Challenges in Developing Persian Corpora from Online Resources" pdf Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Asian Language Processing (IALP), Singapore, 2009.
M. Ghayoomi, S. Momtazi "An Overview on the Existing Language Models for Prediction Systems as Writing Assistant Tools" pdf Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on System, Man, and Cybernetic (SMC), Texas, USA, 2009.
M. Wiegand, S. Momtazi, S. Kazalski, F. Xu, G. Chrupala, D. Klakow "The Alyssa System at TAC QA 2008" pdf Proceedings International Text Analysis Conference (TAC), NIST Campus, Maryland, USA, 2008.
S. Momtazi, S. Kafi, H. Beigy "Solving Stochastic Path Problem: Particle Swarm Optimization Approach" pdf Proceedings of 21st International Conference on Industrial, Engineering & other Applications Applied Intelligent Systems (IEA/AIE), Springer LNAI 5027, pp. 590-600, Wroclaw, Poland, 2008.
M. Bahrani, H. Sameti, N.Hafezi, S. Momtazi "A New Word Clustering Method for Building n-gram Language Models in Continuous Speech Recognition Systems" pdf Proceedings of 21stInternational Conference on Industrial, Engineering & other Applications Applied Intelligent Systems (IEA/AIE), Springer LNAI 5027, pp. 286-293, Wroclaw, Poland, 2008.
S. Momtazi, H.Sameti, S. Vaisipour, M. Tefagh "Introducing a Framework to Create Telephony Speech Databases from Direct Ones" pdf Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Systems, Signal and Image Processing (IWSSIP), Maribor, Slovenia, 2007.
S. Momtazi, H. Sameti, M. Bahrani, N.Hafezi "A pos-based fuzzy word clustering algorithm for continuous speech recognition systems", pdf Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Information Sciences, Signal Processing and its Applications (ISSPA), Sharjeh, UAE, 2007.
S. Momtazi, H. Sameti, M. Fazel-Zarandi, M. Bahrani "A Robust Parser with Word Lattice for Continuous Speech Recognition Systems" pdf Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Information Sciences, Signal Processing and its Applications (ISSPA), Sharjeh, UAE, 2007.
In Persian
M. Bahrani, H. Sameti, S. Momtazi, N.Hafezi "Automatic Word Clustering based on Parts Of Speech for Continuous Speech Recognition Systems" Proceedings of 13th International CSI Computer Conference, Kish Island, Iran, 2008.
S. Momtazi, H. Sameti, M. Bahrani, N.Hafezi "A Fuzzy Approach in Word Clustering for Building Statistical Language Models" Proceedings of 12th International CSI Computer Conference, Tehran, Iran, 2007.
S. Momtazi, M. Fazel-Zarandi, H. Sameti, M. Bahrani "Using a Partial Robust Parser for Continuous Speech Recognition Systems" Proceedings of 11th CSI Computer Conference, Tehran, Iran, 2006.
M. Bahrani, H. Sameti, N. Hafezi, S. Momtazi, H. Movassagh "Using Persian Corpus in Building Statistical Language Model for Persian Continuous Speech Recognition Systems" Proceedings of 2nd Persiancoling Workshop, Tehran, Iran, 2006.
F. Sharifian, S. Momtazi "An Intelligent Method for Improving the Performance of the Partial Order Planning Algorithm" Proceedings of 4th Computer Conference, Tehran, Iran, 2006.
S. Momtazi, M. Akbari, Z. Sazvar, M. Khakestani "Software Feasibility of Logistic Systems in Iran-Khodro Company" Proceedings of 2nd National Conference on Logistics & Supply Chain, Tehran, Iran, 2006.