Freya Hewett
Freya Hewett was a researcher in the AI & Society Lab at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. Her research is focused primarily on text complexity and simplification, and computational methods in this context. She is part of the Applied Computational Linguistics group at the University of Potsdam, where she is working on her dissertation on the topic of coherence and text simplification for German-language texts.
After her Bachelor’s in Italian and English Philology at the Freie Universität Berlin, Freya then continued her studies at the University Potsdam, with the Master’s program Cognitive Systems. There she completed modules on machine learning, computational linguistics and logical programming. Her thesis was on the automatic assessment of text complexity, with a specific focus on the conceptual complexity in German texts.
Prior to working at the HIIG, Freya was a student assistant at the Department for Romance Languages at the University Potsdam and worked on projects related to Open Data and Digital Humanities.
Journal articles and conference proceedings
Hewett, F., Asghari, H., Stede, M. (2024). Elaborative Simplification for German-Language Texts. Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, 29-39. Publication details
Asghari., H., Hewett, F., & Züger, T. (2023). On the Prevalence of Leichte Sprache on the German Web. ACM WebSci ’23 Conference Proceedings, 147-152. DOI: 10.1145/3578503.3583599 Publication details
Hewett, F. (2023). APA-RST: A Text Simplification Corpus with RST Annotations. Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI 2023), 173-179. Publication details
Hewett, F. & Stede, M. (2022). Extractive Summarisation for German-language Data: A Text-level Approach with Discourse Features. Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 756-765. Publication details
Asghari, H. & Hewett, F. (2022). HIIG at GermEval 2022: Best of Both Worlds Ensemble for Automatic Text Complexity Assessment. Proceedings of the GermEval 2022 Workshop on Text Complexity Assessment of German Text, 15–20. Publication details
Hewett, F., & Stede, M. (2021). Automatically evaluating the conceptual complexity of German texts. Proceedings of the 17th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2021), 228–234. Publication details
Other publications
Hewett, F. & Asghari, H. (2023). Lowering the barriers: Accessible language and “Leichte Sprache” on the German Web. Digital society blog. Publication details
Asghari, H., Birner, N., Burchardt, A., Dicks, D., Fassbender, J., Feldhus, N., Hewett, F., Hofmann, V., Kettemann, M. C., Schulz, W., Simon, J., Stolberg-Larsen, J., & Züger, T. (2022). What to explain when explaining is difficult. An interdisciplinary primer on XAI and meaningful information in automated decision-making. HIIG Impact Publication Series. Publication details
Hewett, F., & Stede, M. (2021). Lexica corpus, . Publication details
Hewett, F., & Nenno, S. (2021). How to identify bias in Natural Language Processing. Digital society blog. Publication details
Lectures and presentations (8)
Paper Presentation @ SIGdial 2024
Poster Presentation: Komplexitätsmerkmale auf der Textebene: Eine systematische Korpusanalyse
Workshop “AI-systems for the public interest”
Workshop “AI Systems for the Public Interest“
APA-RST: A Text Simplification Corpus with RST Annotations
Digital tools for text simplification
Automatically evaluating the conceptual complexity of German texts
KICamp21 Webinar: AI in the public interest: What does this mean and how can we build it?
Organisation of events (6)
Lange Nacht der Wissenschaft
Girls’ Day: Die Wissenschaft in Mädchenhänden
Workshop “AI-systems for the public interest”
Workshop: Shifting AI Controversies
Hackathon. Entwicklung von KI-Erklärungsmodellen
AI and the Public Interest
Participation as expert (4)
Workshop: Shifting AI Controversies
Potenziale und Hürden inklusiver Chatbots am Beispiel des Chatbots Ina
Stakeholder-Dialog – Ethik der Digitalisierung
Research Clinic – Explainable AI
Position
Former Researcher: AI & Society Lab
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