Sushil Awale

Research Associate, Visual Analytics Research Group, TIB.

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I am a Research Associate in the Visual Analytics Research Group at TIB, Hannover and a PhD candidate at Leibniz Universität Hannover. I’m supervised by Prof. Dr. Ralph Ewerth. My research interests are in Multimodal Information Retrieval, Question Answering and Knowledge Graphs.

Previously, I worked as a Student Assistant in the Language Technology Group, Universität Hamburg building an intelligent scholarly system powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP).

I completed my Masters in Machine Learning from Universität Hamburg, Germany in 2023 and my Bachelors in Computer Science in 2020 from Tribhuwan University, Nepal.

news

Sep 9, 2025 Presented a hands-on full-day tutorial with Eric Müller-Budack titled Fusing Vision and Language: A Tutorial on Vision-Language Models for Multimodal Content Analysis at KONVENS 2025 - Conference on Natural Language Processing in Hildesheim, Germany. Slides and materials can be found here.
May 30, 2025 Our paper Exploring Patents Visually: An Interactive Search System for Multimodal Patent Image Search and Interpretation (Awale et. al., PatentSemTech@SIGIR 2025) accepted in PatentSemTech Workshop at SIGIR 2025.
Dec 16, 2024 Our paper Patent Figure Classification using Large Vision-language Models (Awale et. al., ECIR 2025) accepted as full paper at ECIR 2025.
Apr 15, 2023 Started working as Research Associate in the Visual Analytics Research Group at TIB, Hannover, Germany.
Mar 13, 2023 Our paper DBLP-QuAD: A Question Answering Dataset over the DBLP Scholarly Knowledge Graph (Banerjee et. al., BIR 2023) accepted in BIR Workshop at ECIR 2023.

selected publications

  1. PatentSemTech
    Exploring Patents Visually: An Interactive Search System for Multimodal Patent Image Search and Interpretation
    Sushil Awale, Eric Müller-Budack, Rahim Delaviz, and 1 more author
    In Workshop on Patent Text Mining and Semantic Technologies co-located with the ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval PatentSemTech@SIGIR 2025, Padua, Italy, July 17, 2025 2025
  2. ECIR
    Patent Figure Classification Using Large Vision-Language Models
    Sushil Awale, Eric Müller-Budack, and Ralph Ewerth
    In European Conference in Information Retrieval, ECIR 2025, Lucca, Italy, April 06-11, 2025 2025
  3. BIR@ECIR
    DBLP-QuAD: A Question Answering Dataset over the DBLP Scholarly Knowledge Graph
    Debayan Banerjee, Sushil Awale, Ricardo Usbeck, and 1 more author
    In Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval co-located with European Conference on Information Retrieval, BIR@ECIR 2023, Dublin, Ireland, April 2, 2023 2023