Research
Publications
Much of my research, including my dissertation, centers on multimodal language generation, especially Referring Expression Generation.
However, I have also published on other topics in computational linguistics, natural language processing and GenAI, mostly in collaboration with other researchers. This includes explanation generation, psychological tests for probing language models and distributed word representations, and visual language grounding.
(Also see Google Scholar, ORCID, Semantic Scholar)
2026
- Simeon Junker. 2026. Visual Context and Communicative Goals in Referring Expression Generation. Dissertation.
2025
- Simeon Junker and Sina Zarrieß. 2025. SceneGram: Conceptualizing and Describing Tangrams in Scene Context. Association for Computational Linguistics: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL Findings 2025). [CODE]
- Simeon Junker, Manar Ali, Larissa Koch, Sina Zarrieß and Hendrik Buschmeier. 2025. Are Multimodal Large Language Models Pragmatically Competent Listeners in Simple Reference Resolution Tasks?. Association for Computational Linguistics: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL Findings 2025). [CODE]
- Sina Zarrieß, Simeon Junker, Judith Sieker and Özge Alacam. 2025. Components of Creativity: Language Model-based Predictors for Clustering and Switching in Verbal Fluency. Association for Computational Linguistics: The SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CONLL 2025).
- Manar Ali, Marika Sarzotti, Simeon Junker, Hendrik Buschmeier and Sina Zarrieß. 2025. Towards Neuro-Symbolic Approaches for Referring Expression Generation. Association for Computational Linguistics: Proceedings of the 2025 CLASP Conference on Language models And RePresentations (LARP 2025).
- Simeon Junker. 2025. ReproHum #0729-04: Human Evaluation Reproduction Report for “MemSum: Extractive Summarization of Long Documents Using Multi-Step Episodic Markov Decision Processes”. Association for Computational Linguistics: Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Generation, Evaluation and Metrics (GEM² 2025). [CODE]
2024
- Simeon Junker and Sina Zarrieß. 2024. Resilience through Scene Context in Visual Referring Expression Generation. Association for Computational Linguistics: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG 2024). BEST PAPER AWARD. [CODE] [SLIDES]
- Judith Sieker, Simeon Junker, Ronja Utescher, Nazia Attari, Heiko Wersing, Hendrik Buschmeier and Sina Zarrieß. 2024. The Illusion of Competence: Evaluating the Effect of Explanations on Users' Mental Models of Visual Question Answering Systems. Association for Computational Linguistics: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2024).
- Simeon Junker and Sina Zarrieß. 2024. Naming Tangrams in Visual Context. Poster at NLG in the Lowlands 2024.
2023
- Simeon Schüz, Albert Gatt and Sina Zarrieß. 2023. Rethinking symbolic and visual context in Referring Expression Generation. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (6).
- Simeon Schüz and Sina Zarrieß. 2023. Keeping an Eye on Context: Attention Allocation over Input Partitions in Referring Expression Generation. Association for Computational Linguistics: Proceedings of the Workshop on Multimodal, Multilingual Natural Language Generation and Multilingual WebNLG Challenge (MM-NLG 2023). [CODE] [SLIDES]
2022
- Özge Alacam, Simeon Schüz, Martin Wegrzyn, Johanna Kißler and Sina Zarrieß. 2022. Exploring Semantic Spaces for Detecting Clustering and Switching in Verbal Fluency. Association for Computational Linguistics: Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2022).
- Simeon Schüz. 2022. Using visual context(s) in neural REG. Talk at NLG in the Lowlands 2022. [SLIDES]
2021
- Simeon Schüz and Sina Zarrieß. 2021. Decoupling Pragmatics: Discriminative Decoding for Referring Expression Generation. Association for Computational Linguistics: Proceedings of the Reasoning and Interaction Conference (ReInAct 2021). [CODE] [SLIDES]
- Simeon Schüz, Ting Han and Sina Zarrieß. 2021. Diversity as a By-Product: Goal-oriented Language Generation Leads to Linguistic Variation. Association for Computational Linguistics: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2021). [CODE]
- Sina Zarrieß, Henrik Voigt and Simeon Schüz. 2021. Decoding Methods in Neural Language Generation: A Survey. Information 12(9), 355.
- Sina Zarrieß, Hendrik Buschmeier, Ting Han and Simeon Schüz. 2021. Decoding, Fast and Slow: A Case Study on Balancing Trade-Offs in Incremental, Character-level Pragmatic Reasoning. Association for Computational Linguistics: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG 2021). [CODE] [SLIDES]
2020
- Simeon Schüz and Sina Zarrieß. 2020. Knowledge Supports Visual Language Grounding: A Case Study on Colour Terms. Association for Computational Linguistics: Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2020).[CODE]
- Simeon Schüz and Sina Zarrieß. 2020. Contextual Knowledge in Visual Language Grounding: Using Object-Specific Information for Colour Naming. Poster at the GeCKo symposium.