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IBM announced the recipients of this year’s Unstructured Information Analytics (UIA) 2008 Award. The UKP Lab represented by Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych from the Computer Science Department of the Technische Universität Darmstadt has been distinguished by two UIA awards. For the first time, a single research lab receives two UIA awards in one year.

The first award is dedicated to support a UIMA-based fundamental course for teaching emerging Natural Language Processing trends to Computer Science students. The UKP Lab developed an innovative teaching concept aimed at establishing a reference university course for teaching UIMA in a research-near environment. This project is situated within a DFG-funded project on Question Answering for eLearning.

The second award goes to the project “DKPro-ML”, which is part of the UKP lab's ongoing Darmstadt Knowledge Processing Software Repository effort. DKPro-ML will establish an open source UIMA based framework for Machine Learning to crucially facilitate the integration of the latest Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning technologies. This effort has been initiated within the BMWI-funded Theseus program, where UKP participates in the TEXO project focusing on the knowledge-based infrastructure for the future Internet of Services.

Both IBM awards support rapidly evolving fields in Natural Language Processing, in particular question answering based on social media and trend analysis in Web 2.0. The awards are offered by IBM in order to promote the dissemination and use of UIMA, the Unstructured Information Management Architecture. UIMA was originally developed by IBM as an open and scalable platform for unstructured information management solutions, including semantic analysis and search components. In 2007, the UKP Lab has already been distinguished by the IBM UIMA Innovation Award. The UIMA-based software created at the UKP Lab will be made available step-by-step at the DKPro web site starting from December 2008.