🎉 Paper accepted at NLDB 2026!

Our paper “Noisy Optimization in Finetuning LMs for Neural Ranking” was accepted 👏 Congrats to Daniel Vollmers, Arnab Sharma & Axel Ngonga!

📍 Trondheim, Norway | June 17–19, 2026

#NLDB2026 #NLP #LLM #Research

🚀 Kick-off of the 2nd funding phase of TRR 318 “Constructing Explainability”!

The Collaborative Research Centre between Paderborn University and Bielefeld University explores how AI explanations can be co-constructed with users.

Our group contributes to two projects:
👉 INF – building a data & information management infrastructure with RAG-based QA
👉 C07 – interactive, dialogue-based explanations with LLMs

Thanks to the organizing team for a great kick-off!

🔗 https://trr318.uni-paderborn.de/

🚀 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗥𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲𝘀: 𝗢𝗻𝘁𝗼𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻, 𝗢𝗪𝗟𝗔𝗣𝗬 & 𝗗𝗜𝗖𝗘 𝗘𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗱𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀

Ontolearn: Refactored concept & neural learners, improved triple store, and new SAT-based learners.👉https://github.com/dice-group/Ontolearn

OWLAPy: Introducing AGen-KG, a scalable agentic KG generation model from text with prompt-based customization.
👉 https://github.com/dice-group/owlapy

DICE Embeddings: New KGE models, ensemble & weight-averaging strategies, improved evaluation workflows, tutorials, and bug fixes.
👉https://github.com/dice-group/dice-embeddings?tab=readme-ov-file

Yesterday, we hosted the HNI Forum 2026 at the Heinz Nixdorf Institute, bringing together researchers to discuss Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence.

🎤Prof. Hector Geffner (RWTH Aachen University) spoke on "Representation learning to act and plan”
🎤Prof. Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo presented “Explainable neurosymbolic machine learning on knowledge graphs”

Great discussions and interdisciplinary exchange—thanks to everyone who joined! 🙌
#NeurosymbolicAI #ExplainableAI #AIResearch #HNI

🚀 We’re excited to announce two paper acceptances The Web Conference (#TheWebConf2026), taking place April 13–17 in Dubai.

👉"A Simplex Approach to Synthetic Knowledge Graph Generation" by Ana Silva, Atul Bhopalsing Pundir, Michael Röder & Axel Ngonga.

👉"Discrete Diffusion-Based Model-Level Explanation of Heterogeneous GNNs with Node Features" by Pallabee Das & Stefan Heindorf.

👏 Congratulations to all authors!

We’re excited that our colleague Yasir Mahmood is presenting two papers at the AAAI Conference in Singapore!🚀

👉 "Structure-Aware Encodings of Argumentation Properties for Clique-width" by Yasir Mahmood, Markus Hecher, Johanna Groven & Johannes K. Fichte
👉 "Can You Tell the Difference? Contrastive Explanations for ABox Entailments" by Patrick Koopmann, Yasir Mahmood, Axel Ngona & Balram Tiwari

Wishing you a great time and many inspiring exchanges with the AI community!

#DICEontour #AAAI2026

✨ 𝗛𝗮𝗽𝗽𝘆 𝗛𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗗𝗜𝗖𝗘✨

As the year comes to an end, we’d like to say thank you to everyone who was part of DICE in 2025, our team, collaborators, partners, and the wider research community.
We wish you happy holidays, a restful end of the year, and a great start to 2026. 🎄✨

✨ 𝗗𝗜𝗖𝗘 𝗶𝗻 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱 – 𝗬𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝗥𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄 (𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝟮)

The second half of 2025 brought strong visibility and key milestones for DICE:
🚀 Launch of Learn2RAG (BMWE-funded)
🎉 Public engagement at 100 years Heinz Nixdorf
🌍 Research presented at IJCAI, ECML PKDD, ISWC, K-CAP & more
📈 Our neuro-symbolic ML tools (DICE Embeddings, Ontolearn, OWLAPY) surpassed 100K downloads

Thanks to everyone who made this year a success — here’s to 2026! 🚀