I work on NLP and LLMs, with a focus on reliable knowledge access and LLM safety. I’m interested in how systems retrieve and use evidence, and what happens when important evidence is missing.
My recent work includes CORE-T, a framework for retrieving coherent sets of tables for text-to-SQL. I’m also investigating the robustness of retrieval-augmented and agentic systems to incomplete evidence.
Previously, I was an AI researcher in DFKI’s Educational Technology Lab in Berlin, supervised by Dr. Miloš Kravčík. I worked on educational chatbots, retrieval-augmented mentoring, and adaptive dialogue.
My ongoing SafeLLMs research studies strategic missingness: how omitted evidence can affect the conclusions of LLM-based systems. I’m exploring evidence coverage, retrieval, and evaluation in retrieval-augmented generation and agentic fact-checking.
Ongoing research
Retrieval over structured knowledge
How can a system find not just individually relevant tables, but a set that works together? In CORE-T, we study training-free, join-coherent table retrieval for open-book text-to-SQL over large, heterogeneous collections.
Developed CORE-T for training-free, coherent table retrieval, evaluated across BIRD, Spider, MMQA, and BEAVER; accepted to EMNLP 2026 Main.
Investigating evidence coverage and strategic missingness in retrieval-augmented and agentic systems, alongside tutoring and master’s thesis supervision.
Manage lab publication workflows, tracking deadlines, following up with authors, and coordinating and automating internal reviews to help submissions meet venue standards.
Jan 2023 – Dec 2024
AI Researcher · DFKI
Berlin, Germany
Educational Technology Lab
Led two projects and supervised two students; developed a graduate-course chatbot answering student queries with 87% accuracy.
Combined hybrid retrieval and reranking with LangGraph mentoring workflows and small open-source models on Azure; benchmarked dialogue adaptation to emotional state and demographics.
May 2022 – Aug 2022
Applied Scientist Intern · Bosch Center for AI
Renningen, Germany
NLP & Semantic Reasoning
Transferred neural entity-linking research to industrial data, achieving 77% end-to-end top-3 recall on a large domain-specific dataset.
Fine-tuned models on the in-house GPU cluster and refactored, tested, and documented production-level ML code.
Jun 2021 – Jan 2022
Master’s Thesis Student · Bosch Center for AI
Renningen, Germany
In collaboration with Saarland University
Used context-aware BERT embeddings in a joint vector space to link entities across Wikipedia and domain-specific knowledge bases.
Improved top-1 average precision by 9% and top-10 MAP by 20% across four domain-specific knowledge bases; the work led to a RepL4NLP @ ACL 2022 publication.
Nov 2020 – May 2021
Research Assistant · Max Planck Institute for Informatics
Saarbrücken, Germany
Database & Information Systems
Developed entity set-expansion prototypes using Wikipedia lists to identify diverse peer groups for entities.
Achieved a 3× faster runtime through efficient sparse matrix multiplication.
Aug 2019 – Feb 2020
Software Development Engineer Intern · Amazon
Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Fulfillment Acceleration · Luxembourg
Maintained an AWS-based web simulation tool as a full-stack engineer to model delivery speed for Prime customers.
Supported fulfillment analysis and reporting, and maintained server infrastructure and team tools in an Agile environment.
Compared multilingual embeddings, TF-IDF with Multinomial Naive Bayes, and fine-tuned transformers for language identification across 20 languages.
Used multilingual-e5-large-instruct to build representative language embeddings and classify documents by cosine similarity.
Achieved 99.81% accuracy on the papluca/language-identification benchmark; analyzed F1 scores and confusion matrices and released a reproducible Colab notebook.
NLP foundations, LLM architectures and training, prompting, and fine-tuning. Practical topics include information retrieval, dense retrieval, rerankers, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic approaches, and hands-on model evaluation.
Oct 2025 – Mar 2026 · Winter semester 2025–26: tutoring through practical exercises, programming assignments, and student support.
Oct 2026 – Mar 2027 · Winter semester 2026–27: tutoring, including preparation of practical sessions and learning materials.
Master’s Thesis Supervision
TU Darmstadt · Darmstadt, Germany
Apr 2026 – Oct 2026 · Abdelrahman Abdelgawad — extending CORE-T to multimodal retrieval: finding coherent evidence across modalities for downstream question answering.