Lennart Wachowiak

Lennart Wachowiak

PhD Student at the Centre for Doctoral Training in Safe and Trusted Artificial Intelligence

King's College London

Biography

I am a PhD candidate at King’s College and Imperial College London, where I am part of a cohort researching how to make AI safe and trustworthy. In my current project, I am investigating how robots can learn to proactively explain their decisions and assist people in collaborative scenarios. As part of this, I train machine learning models to predict when explanations are needed and what they should be about by interpreting the user’s non-verbal behaviour and contextual task clues.

I love interdisciplinary work, learning about different perspectives, and combining them to get a rich understanding of a phenomenon. Beyond designing human–robot experiments, for which I draw on my background in cognitive science and AI, I am researching conceptual metaphors and image schemas in text corpora using tools from natural language processing and theories from cognitive linguistics.

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Interests
  • Human–Robot Interaction
  • User-centered Explanations
  • Natural Language Processing for Cognitive Linguistics
Education

  • PhD in Safe and Trusted AI, 2021-2025

    King's College London, Imperial College London

  • MSc in Cognitive Science, 2018-2021

    Joint Degree with University of Vienna, University of Ljubljana, Comenius University Bratislava, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest

  • BSc in Computer Science, 2014-2017

    University of Paderborn

Research Areas

Here you can find the different research topics I investigated. Click on one to find further information on the topic and the corresponding publications.

When, What, and How to Explain?
During my PhD I work on explainable robotics and how to make explanations more user-centered by adapting proactivly to the user’s mental state as inferred from social cues and task context.
When, What, and How to Explain?
Conceptual Metaphors and Image Schemas
How can we identify and analyse conceptual metaphors and image schemas in natural language texts? In what situations are they used? What words and syntactic structures indicate them?
Conceptual Metaphors and Image Schemas
Extracting Terminological Concept Systems
Research on how to automatically extract and organize domain-specific kowledge from multilingual text.
Extracting Terminological Concept Systems

Publications

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Lennart Wachowiak, Andrew Coles, Oya Celiktutan, Gerard Canal (2024). Are Large Language Models Aligned with People's Social Intuitions for Human-Robot Interactions?. IROS.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Peter Tisnikar, Andrew Coles, Gerard Canal, Matteo Leonetti, Oya Celiktutan (2024). Predicting When and What to Explain From Multimodal Eye Tracking and Task Signals. Transactions on Affective Computing.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Andrew Coles, Gerard Canal, Oya Celiktutan (2024). A Taxonomy of Explanation Types and Need Indicators in Human–Agent Collaborations. Journal of Social Robotics.

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Philipp Wicke, Lennart Wachowiak (2024). Exploring Spatial Schema Intuitions in Large Language and Vision Models. ACL Findings.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Andrew Fenn, Haris Kamran, Oya Celiktutan, Andrew Coles, Gerard Canal (2024). When Do People Want an Explanation from a Robot?. HRI.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Dagmar Gromann, Chao Xu (2023). The Image Schema VERTICALITY: Definitions and Annotation Guidelines. Image Schema Day.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Dagmar Gromann (2023). Does GPT-3 Grasp Metaphors? Identifying Metaphor Mappings with Generative Language Models. ACL.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Oya Celiktutan, Andrew Coles, Gerard Canal (2023). A Survey of Evaluation Methods and Metrics for Explanations in Human–Robot Interaction (HRI). ICRA Explainable Robotics Workshop.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Dagmar Gromann, Chao Xu (2022). Drum Up SUPPORT: Systematic Analysis of Image-Schematic Conceptual Metaphors. EMNLP Workshop FLP.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Dagmar Gromann (2022). Systematic Analysis of Image Schemas in Natural Language through Explainable Multilingual Neural Language Processing. COLING.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Peter Tisnikar, Gerard Canal, Andrew Coles, Matteo Leonetti, Oya Celiktutan (2022). Analysing Eye Gaze Patterns during Confusion and Errors in Human–Agent Collaborations. RO-MAN.

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Peter Tisnikar, Lennart Wachowiak, Gerard Canal, Andrew Coles, Matteo Leonetti, Oya Celiktutan (2022). Towards Autonomous Collaborative Robots that Adapt and Explain. ICRA Workshop on Prediction and Anticipation Reasoning in HRI.

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Dagmar Gromann, Lennart Wachowiak, Christian Lang, Barbara Heinisch (2022). Extracting Terminological Concept Systems from Natural Language Text. Cognitive Technologies.

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Christian Lang, Lennart Wachowiak, Barbara Heinisch, Dagmar Gromann (2021). CogALex 2.0: Impact of Data Quality on Lexical-Semantic Relation Prediction. NeurIPS DCAI Workshop.

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Dagmar Gromann, Christian Lang, Lennart Wachowiak, Barbara Heinisch (2021). Multilingual Extraction of Terminological Concept Systems. Workshop on Deep Learning and Neural Approaches for Linguistic Data.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Christian Lang, Barbara Heinisch, Dagmar Gromann (2021). Towards Learning Terminological Concept Systems from Multilingual Natural Language Text. Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (awarded best student paper).

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Christian Lang, Lennart Wachowiak, Barbara Heinisch, Dagmar Gromann (2021). Transforming Term Extraction: Transformer-Based Approaches to Multilingual Term Extraction Across Domains. ACL Findings.

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Lennart Wachowiak, Christian Lang, Barbara Heinisch, Dagmar Gromann (2020). CogALex-VI Shared Task: Transrelation - A Robust Multilingual Language Model for Multilingual Relation Identification. Workshop on the Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (1st place in CogALex shared task).

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Lennart Wachowiak (2020). Semi-automatic Extraction of Image Schemas from Natural Language. MEi:CogSci Conference.

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Rebecca Varga, Lennart Wachowiak (2019). Grounded Language Learning in Robots-An Information-Theoretic Approach to Adjective Learning. MEi:CogSci Conference.

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