Dr. Matthias Aßenmacher

Bio

I obtained my bachelor’s degree in Economics from LMU in 2014, and my Master’s degree in Statistics (with a focus on social and economic studies) in 2017 (also from LMU). In 2021 I finished my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Christian Heumann with a focus on Natural Language Processing, before joining the Chair for Statistical Learning and Data Science (headed by Prof. Dr. Bernd Bischl) in early 2022 as a Postdoc.

Teaching

I am actively involved in teaching at Bachlor and Master level at the Department of Statistics.

Mainly, I am responsible for the following lectures:

• Grundlagen der Statistik für Studierende der Wirtschaftswissenschaften ("Fundamentals of Statistics")
• Deep Learning for NLP I (w/ Prof. Dr. Hinrich Schütze, CIS)
• Deep Learning for NLP II (w/ Prof. Dr. Valentin Hofmann, CIS)

I supervise mostly theses on various NLP-related topics. Please read the information below before sending me an e-mail:

• Include the following information in your e-mail: (1) your field of interest and a tentative idea for a topic, (2) CV and your current transcript, and (3) a planned starting date and timeline for your thesis (you should also bring some time for developing and refining a research idea, so do not expect to start in e.g. one week)
• If you want to apply for supervision of an external thesis, please also include the following information in your email: (1) A clear formulation of the thesis goal from an academic perspective (it should not be a pure business case, such projects are better suited for e.g. the Consulting module), and (2) information on the company, data availability, computational resources supplied by the company

Research

My focus is on methodological and applied NLP research, including (but not limited to) the following topics:

• Low-Resource and Historical Languages
• (Sampling-based) Decoding
• Reproducibility & Benchmarking (of LLMs)
• NLP-Resources and Evaluation Strategies
• Uncertainty Quantification

Collaborations

I have ongoing (external) collaborations with: the following institutions:

• Bavarian Academy of Sciences (M. Schöffel)
• ZITiS (M. Hofer)
• Geschwister-Scholl-Institut for Political Science (P. Thurner, O. Pamp)