Projects

SFB1102 - Information Density and Linguistic Encoding (IDeaL)

Language provides not only the expressiveness needed to communicate, but also offers speakers a multitude of choices regarding how they may encode their messages – from the choice of words, structuring of syntactic elements, and arranging sentences in discourse. The SFB addresses the hypothesis that language variation and language use can be better understood in terms of the goal of speakers to modulate the amount of information conveyed in an utterance. [read more...]

Cluster of Excellence Multimodal Computing and Interaction (MMCI)

The Excellence Initiative of the German Research Foundation (DFG) seeks to establish internationally visible, top-level research facilities that foster scientific collaboration among institutions and provide excellent training and career support for young researchers. Established within this framework in November 2007, the Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction is now in its second funding phase. It brings together researchers from the Computer Science and Computational Linguistics and Phonetics departments of Saarland University, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems.

Registers in contact: linguistic evolution of specialized scientific registers

The topic of the present project is the linguistic evolution of functional variation in highly-specialized scientific domains. The project aims to analyze domain-specific variation emerged through register contact in a corpus of English scientific texts. Our focus lies on scientific domains or disciplines at the boundaries of computer science (i.e. computational linguistics, bioinformatics). The central question of the project is: what are the linguistic means used to create a distinctive identity of disciplines emerged through register contact? From a linguistic point of view the subject of study is a phenomenon of recent language change, not related to the language system, but rather to language use. [read more...]

SLingPro - Linguistic Profiles of Social Variables in Diachrony

Start-Up Project funded by Saarland University

The project aims in the long-term to investigate speaker's language use based on social variables such as age, gender or social background/class over time.

For example: Do older and younger speaker use different linguistic features (e.g. word choice, grammatical structures)? Does this change or remain stable over time? How do several social variables (age, gender, social background/class) interact with each other? [read more...]

VARTRA

Our goal: to investigate translation variation, focusing on textual and lexico-grammatical variation brought about by translation production type (human vs. machine vs. computer-aided translation vs. post-edited translation) [read more...]

EXPERT (EXPloiting Empirical appRoaches to Translation)

EXPERT (EXPloiting Empirical appRoaches to Translation) aims to train young researchers, namely Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) and Experienced Researchers (ERs), to promote the research, development and use of hybrid language translation technologies. [read more...]