Justus-Jonas Erker

Doctoral Researcher at UKP Lab of TU Darmstadt

Justus.jpeg

📍 S2|02 D017

UKP Lab, TU Darmstadt

Hochschulstraße 10

64289 Darmstadt

Germany

Hey there 👋, I am a PhD Candidate in Natural Language Processing and fortunate to be supervised by Dr. Nils Reimers and Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych.

I am deeply fascinated by the ability to encode sequential information into Sentence-Transformers representations, enabling emergent properties and behaviors using just cosine similarity. The elegance of representing intricate sequential structures through such a simple yet powerful similarity measure is still stealing my sleep. Apart from my passion on representation learning and retrieval my research interests evolve around:

  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation
  • Distributed Representation Learning
  • Dialog Modeling
  • Efficient NLP

Hobbies:

In my free time I like to spend time outside in nature, either hiking (with my dogs) or mountain biking. You most probably will see me walking around with headphones, not because I am not willing to talk to you but because I am very passionate music listener. (I also play some music, preferred instruments: piano, guitar and drums)

news

Aug 10, 2023 My paper Triple-Encoders got accepted at ACL 2024 Main!🥳 If you want to learn more about weightless contextualization (using nothing else than embeddings) feel free to check out our python library on distributed sentence transformers.
Aug 10, 2023 I will start a Ph.D. in representation learning at the UKP Lab, TU Darmstadt supervised by Dr. Nils Reimers and Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych. in October 2023 🥳
May 2, 2013 My paper Imagination Is All You Need! got accepted in the 2023 Findings of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL). If you are also joining ACL 2023 in Toronto, Canada from the 9th to the 14th of July, hit me up. I would be keen to have a chat there!

selected publications

  1. Triple-Encoders: Representations That Fire Together, Wire Together
    Justus-Jonas Erker, Florian Mai, Nils Reimers, Gerasimos Spanakis and Iryna Gurevych
    Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), Aug 2024
  2. Imagination is All You Need! Curved Contrastive Learning for Abstract Sequence Modeling Utilized on Long Short-Term Dialogue Planning
    Justus-Jonas Erker, Stefan Schaffer, and Gerasimos Spanakis
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, Jul 2023
  3. A Cancel Culture Corpus through the Lens of Natural Language Processing
    Justus-Jonas Erker, Catalina Goanta, and Gerasimos Spanakis
    In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Technology and Resources for a Fair, Inclusive, and Safe Society within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Jun 2022