Hermann Kroll

Hermann Kroll

Computer Scientist

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ORCID
DBLP

Description

I am a PhD student at the Institute for Information Systems, TU Braunschweig led by Wolf-Tilo Balke.


I am interested in research that boosts literature retrieval and search in digital libraries. My works focus on bridging the gap between unstructured information (natural language text) and structured representations (document graphs, knowledge graphs, etc.). Therefore, I proposed narrative information access, which allows users to formulate information needs as graph patterns while preserving result validity through context-compatible information fusion. My research interests include narratives, information extraction, entity linking, text classification, and query processing. My research aims to allow more sophisticated retrieval by adding structure to digital library collections.



PC Member: TPDL [2024] (International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries). ECIR [2024] (European Conference on Information Retrieval), DISCO [2021] (Digital Infrastructures for Scholarly Content Objects@JCDL). LWDA [2020] (Lernen. Wissen. Daten. Analysen.)

Reviewer: IJDL (International Journal on Digital Libraries), IPM (International Journal on Information Processing and Management)

Projects

I am working for the specialized information service for Pharmacy (www.pubpharm.de). The project's overall goal is to support pharmaceutical literature search for the German academic landscape. I have been developing the Narrative Service for PubPharm. The Narrative Service allows users to formulate their information need as structured graph patterns. The service returns publications that match the corresponding pattern, i.e., they contain the desired information. Therefore, we transformed the literature into so-called document graphs through entity linking and information extraction. One special feature of the service is the support of queries with variables (e.g., which drugs to treat Diabetes Mellitus). To allow eased access, users can now formulate their information needs as keywords, and the service proposes possible patterns automatically. In addition to the Narrative Service, I have been developing the Drug Overview service which generates a structured literature overview about a drug by combining information from specialized databases and information extracted from research literature. The information is derived by the following steps: a set of narrative queries with variables is executed, the results are aggregated, and shown to the user. A click on some information will forward the user to corresponding text passages/sources to show from where the information was derived.

Publications


2023


2022


2021

  • Hermann Kroll, Jan Pirklbauer, Jan-Christoph Kalo, Morris Kunz, Johannes Ruthmann, and Wolf-Tilo Balke. Narrative Query Graphs for Entity-Interaction-Aware Document Retrieval. International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL), Online, 2021, Springer.
    [Preprint] DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91669-5_7
    Talk: [Slides] [YouTube]
  • Hermann Kroll, and Christina Draheim. Narrative Information Access for a Precise and Structured Literature Search. O-Bib. Das Offene Bibliotheksjournal 2021.
    [PDF] DOI: https://doi.org/10.5282/o-bib/5730
  • Hermann Kroll, Judy Al-Chaar, and Wolf-Tilo Balke. Open Information Extraction in Digital Libraries: Current Challenges and Open Research Questions. Workshop on Digital Infrastructures for Scholarly Content Objects (DISCO) at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA, 2021, CEUR-WS.
    [Preprint] [PDF] DOI: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2976/short-1.pdf
    Talk: [Slides] [YouTube]
  • Hermann Kroll, Jan Pirklbauer, and Wolf-Tilo Balke. A Toolbox for the Nearly-Unsupervised Construction of Digital Library Knowledge Graphs. ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA, 2021, IEEE.
    [Preprint] DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/JCDL52503.2021.00014
    Talk: [Slides] [YouTube]
  • Hermann Kroll, Denis Nagel, Morris Kunz, and Wolf-Tilo Balke. Demonstrating Narrative Bindings: Linking Discourses to Knowledge Repositories. Workshop on Narrative Extraction From Texts (Text2Story) at the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), Lucca, Italy, 2021, CEUR-WS.
    [Preprint] [PDF] DOI: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2860/paper7.pdf
    Talk: [Slides] [YouTube]

2020

  • Hermann Kroll, Denis Nagel, and Wolf-Tilo Balke. Modeling Narrative Structures in Logical Overlays on top of Knowledge Repositories. International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER), Vienna, Austria, 2020, Springer.
    [Preprint] DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62522-1_18
    Summary Talk: [Slides] [YouTube] Long Talk: [Slides] [YouTube]
  • Hermann Kroll, Jan-Christoph Kalo, Denis Nagel, Stephan Mennicke, and Wolf-Tilo Balke. Context-Compatible Information Fusion for Scientific Knowledge Graphs. International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL), Lyon, France, 2020, Springer.
    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54956-5_3
    Talk: [Slides] [YouTube]
  • Hermann Kroll, Jan Pirklbauer, Johannes Ruthmann, and Wolf-Tilo Balke. A Semantically Enriched Dataset based on Biomedical NER for the COVID19 Open Research Dataset Challenge, 2020.
    arXiv: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2005.08823
  • Katharina Ostaszewski, Philip Heinisch, Ingo Richter, Hermann Kroll, Wolf-Tilo Balke, Diego Fraga, and Karl-Heinz Glaßmeier. Pattern recognition in time series for space missions: A rosetta magnetic field case study. Acta Astronautica 2020.
    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2019.11.037

2019

  • Kristof Keßler, Hermann Kroll, Janus Wawrzinek, Christina Draheim, Stefan Wulle, Katrin Stump, and Wolf-Tilo Balke. PubPharm – Gemeinsam von der informationswissenschaftlichen Grundlagenforschung zum nachhaltigen Service. ABI Technik 2019.
    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/abitech-2019-4005
  • Stephan Mennicke, Jan-Christoph Kalo, Denis Nagel, Hermann Kroll, and Wolf-Tilo Balke. Fast Dual Simulation Processing of Graph Database Queries. IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Macau, China, 2019, IEEE.
    [Preprint] DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDE.2019.00030

2018

  • Hermann Kroll, Denis Nagel, and Wolf-Tilo Balke. BAFREC: Balancing Frequency and Rarity for Entity Characterization in Open Linked Data. 1st International Workshop on Entity REtrieval (EYRE) at the ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Turin, Italy, 2018.
    [Preprint] [PDF] DOI: http://ws.nju.edu.cn/conf/eyre2018/paper_14.pdf


Recorded Talks

  • Deutsch: Recherche mit Narrative Service, Long COVID und Drug Overviews
    [YouTube]
  • Drug Overview Tutorial
    [YouTube]
  • Drug Overview: Drug-Target-Disease Network Tutorial
    [YouTube]
  • Long COVID / COVID-19 / ME/CFS Overview Tutorial
    [YouTube]


Teaching


Lectures/Seminars

# Year Semester Course Name Role
1 2023 Winter Relational Database Systems 1 Lecturer
2 2023 Summer Relational Database Systems 2 Assistant
3 2022 Winter Relational Database Systems 1 Assistant
4 2022 Summer Multimedia Databases Assistant
5 2021 Winter Seminar: Narrative Information Access Assistant
6 2020 Winter Deductive Databases and Knowledge-based Systems Assistant
7 2019 Winter Relational Database Systems 1 Assistant
8 2019 Summer Relational Database Systems 2 Assistant
9 2018 Winter Relational Database Systems 1 Assistant


Student Projects

# Year Course Name Type Role
1 2023 A pharmaceutical PDF table extraction pipeline Teamproject Supervisor
2 2022 Graph-based Exploration of Long COVID Literature Teamproject Supervisor
3 2021 Narrative Information Access for Pharmacy (Drug Overviews) Teamproject Supervisor
4 2021 SherloQL 2.0 Teamproject Supervisor
5 2020 SherloQL Software Development Project Supervisor
6 2019 A Narrative Query Designer Teamproject Supervisor
7 2019 Music Tinder Software Development Project Supervisor