Automatic processing of natural language in all its facets is the core research interest of Nils Reiter and his research group. The history of natural language process and computational linguistics go back to the 1960s and quite diverse methods have been applied to this problem in the past. Since roughly 2000, more and more practical applications and research systems are built using machine learning systems, because the number of (potentially) influencing contextual factors for making decisions in language is enormeous and very difficult to take into account manually.

Nils Reiter’s work is specifically focused on applications of computational linguistics methods and best practices on research data and research problems in the humanities and social sciences: With team members and collaboration partners, he works on the quantitative analysis of dramatic texts and theater plays, the automatic understanding of narrative texts and story telling and generally methods to combine qualitative and quantitative research.