Studi-BUCH

NLP in Education Research

Jointly with Prof. Dr. Stefan Conrad from HHU Düsseldorf, I received a grant from the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space to develop competencies in text analysis and to support other educational researchers in working with textual data (Grant number: 16DKWN139A - Studi-BUCH).  

The grant is based on three pillars: First, extensive textual data on the German higher education market will be digitized and systematically analyzed using NLP and ML methods.  Second, we will describe the development of the German higher education landscape over the past 50 years and how these affected educational choices and (regional) labor markets. We will also develop policy recommendations for the further development of the tertiary education sector. Third, we will support the development of other researchers' competencies in the area of text analysis. 

Please contact me if...

... you are interested in using our data (or want to learn more about it)

... you have interesting textual data but need assistance in analyzing it

Workshops (past & upcoming)

May 22 & 23, 2023: Program - Keynotes: Anna Kerkhof (ifo & LMU) and Theresa Gessler (Uni Viadrina) 

May 16 & 17, 2024: Program - Keynotes: Alessandra Casarico (Uni Bocconi & SI Lab) and Simon Wiederhold (IWH Halle)

July 9 & 10, 2025: Program - Keynotes: Felix Chopra (Frankfurt School of Finance & Management) and Frauke Peter (DZHW)

Publications

Peer-reviewed publications:

Thome, Boris, Friederike Hertweck & Stefan Conrad, 2025. Predicting Perceived Text Complexity: The Role of Person-Related Features in Profile-Based Models. Journal of Educational Data Mining, 17(1), 276–307.

Thome, Boris, Friederike Hertweck, Lukas Jonas & Serife Yasar, 2024. Automated Extraction of Icon-based Tables, GI-Edition Lecture Notes in Informatics, pp. 2003-2005.

Thome, Boris, Friederike Hertweck & Stefan Conrad, 2024. Determining Perceived Text Complexity: An Evaluation of German Sentences Through Student Assessments, Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2024), pp. 714-721.

Datasets:

Hertweck, Friederike, Lukas Jonas, Boris Thome & Serife Yasar, 2024. RWI-UNI-SUBJECTS: Complete records of all subjects across German HEIs (1971 - 1996). RWI-Micro. Version: 1. RWI – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.7807/studi:buch:suf:v1. 

Work in Progress

The Impact of University Openings on Local Youth (with Serife Yasar)

The effect of computer science at HEIs on local labor markets (with Shihang Hou, Britta Jensen & Lukas Jonas)