Let yourself be carried away into my world

My name is Katrin Affolter and I’m a computer scientist with a passion for natural language processing. I did my bachelor and master at the University of Zurich at the Computer Science department which cooperates with the Computational Linguistics department and provided a shared track.

Today, I work in a data scientist team as an NLP expert and support the team in software engineering question. In this setting, I am stumble over interesting questions. Most of them can be shortly answered, but some of them will follow me around until I dealt with them in more detail.

So, in my spare time, I play around with Python and if the weather is good, you can catch me outside with my camera.

Publications

Affolter, K., Stockinger, K. & Bernstein, A. A comparative survey of recent natural language interfaces for databases. The VLDB Journal 28, 793–819 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00778-019-00567-8
Bubenhofer N., Rothenhäusler K., Affolter K., Pajovic D. (2019) The Linguistic Construction of World: An Example of Visual Analysis and Methodological Challenges. In: Scholz R. (eds) Quantifying Approaches to Discourse for Social Scientists. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97370-8_9
Sima, A. C., Stockinger, K., Affolter, K., Braschler, M., Monte, P., & Kaiser, L. (2018). A hybrid approach for alarm verification using stream processing, machine learning and text analytics. In EDBT 2018, Vienna, Austria, 26-29 March 2018. ACM. https://doi.org/10.21256/zhaw-3487

Work Experience

current

NLP Data Scientist

Balzano Informatik AG, Zürich, Switzerland

Identifying and mapping relations between body parts and pathologies in German radiology reports
Developing and maintaining ontology used for identification
Writing blog posts about my work
Helping to define and establish processes (e.g. code review)

Python (NLTK, spaCy), Ontology (Turtle), Azure, Git, Scrum

2018 - 2019

(Oct. - July)

NLP Software Developer

Move Digital AG, Zürich, Switzerland

Using and developing an ontology to identify topics in different types of documents
Developing algorithms to show related information for various document types (Recommendation System)
Developing intelligent search functionality for documents dependent on the types of keywords

Java (Stanford CoreNLP), Python, Ontology (OWL, RDF, Turtle), SPARQL, Elastic Search, MySQL, Postgres, REST API, Git, Scrum

2017 - 2018

(Apr. - Sept.)

Research Assistant, InIT Information Engineering

Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW)

Developing an automated text analysis of messages about events
(fire, burglary, etc.)
Researching and developing a natural language interface for databases
Teaching Assistant for Database Moduls

Java (Stanford CoreNLP), Python (NLTK), JavaScript, SQL, MongoDB, RDF, SPARQL, Spark, Git

2016 - 2017

(Oct. - Mar.)

Software Engineer

Atfinity GmbH, Zürich, Switzerland

Developing a customer specific CRM

Python, JavaScript (React), Elastic Search, Git, Scrum

2012 - 2016

(Jan. - Oct.)

Freelancer, Web Developer

Synventis GmbH, Basel, Switzerland

Implementing webpages for desktop and mobile devices
Responsible for customer support and liaison

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Git, SVN, Scrum

University of Zurich: Education & Work

2015 - 2016

MSc. in Informatics

Multimodal and Cognitive Systems

Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology

Thesis: "Calculation and Visualization of Narrative Structures"

2012 - 2015

BSc. in Informatics

Applied Informatics: Computational Linguistics

Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology

Thesis: "Statistical Machine Translation of Technical Documentations"

2015

(May - Sept.)

Research Assistant, Software Developer

Department of Political Science

Project: "Measuring policy diffusion with automated content analysis: The case of smoking bans in Switzerland and the United States"

Translating a topic modeling script from R Code into Java,
including individual adaptations of the script
Supervising students working on the project

Java, R Code, Git

2014 - 2015

(Nov. - May)

Student Assistant, Software Developer & Computational Linguistic

Institute of Computational Linguistics - in collaboration with Finnova AG

Developing a machine translation system for technical documentations and implementing suggest improvements based on my bachelor’s thesis

Python (NLTK), C++, Moses SMT, Git

2013 - 2014

Tutor

Institute of Computational Linguistics

Programming techniques in computational linguistics I (HS13)
Programming techniques in computational linguistics II (FS13 & FS14)

Python (NLTK), Bash