News

Numerous scientific publications from our department were accepted at the the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
Congratulations to all authors!

“Provably Learning Attention with Queries” by
Satwik Bhattamishra, Kulin Shah, Michael Hahn, Varun Kanade.“Discovering Interpretable Algorithms by Decompiling Transformers to RASP” by
Xinting Huang, Aleksandra Bakalova, Satwik Bhattamishra, William Merrill, Michael Hahn.“A Framework for Understanding Learnability in Transformers” by
Blanka… [...]

Numerous scientific publications from our department were accepted at the  Cognitive Science Society (CogSci) 2026.
Congratulations to all authors!

"Reflecting the Readers of Today: An Update of the American English Author Recognition Task" by Ana Celmare, Ted Sanders, Merel Scholman"Referring Effectively to a Group of Objects" by Emilia Ellsiepen, Alexandra Mayn, Natalia Bila, Vera Demberg"Expectation-based Linearization: Evidence from German Word-Order and Information Structure" by Torsten Kai… [...]

Numerous scientific publications from our department were accepted at the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2026
Congratulations to all authors!

Main conference:

“Disco-RAG: Discourse-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation” 
by Dongqi Liu, Hang Ding, Qiming Feng, Jian Li, Xurong Xie, Zhucun Xue, Chengjie Wang, Jiangning Zhang, Yabiao Wang."From Weights to Activations: Is Steering the Next Frontier of Adaptation?"
by Simon Ostermann, Daniil Gurgurov, Tanja Baeumel, Michael A.… [...]

The Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize is Germany’s most prestigious award for early-career researchers. One of the 10 coveted awards in 2026 goes to Dr. Michael Hahn, a professor of computational linguistics at Saarland University. [...]

Artificial intelligence has become an integral part of everyday (working) life. However, AI-based systems – for example, those used to improve medical diagnoses – have one major shortcoming: they are based on statistical patterns and cannot ‘understand’ how cause and effect are related, unlike humans. Newly appointed professor Sara Magliacane aims to fill this gap with her research: ‘We often don't know exactly what the neural networks in the background of an AI-supported system are calculating,…

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Around 40,000 years ago, our early ancestors carved symbols into tools and sculptures to record and share their thoughts: lines, dots, notches or crosses that were often repeated. For Christian Bentz, Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Language Technology at Saarland University, it is clear: ‘An early alternative to writing’. As part of the research project The Evolution of Visual Information Encoding (EVINE), which is funded by the European Research Council with an…

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The Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM) reports on this here.
We congratulate Prof. Dr. Demberg on this achievement!

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Numerous papers of our department were accepted at the   Language Resources and Evaluation Conference  LREC (2026).
Congratulations to all authors!

"Using LLMs for Automatic Discipline Annotation in a Diachronic Corpus of English Scientific Papers" by Sergei Bagdasarov, Diego Alves, Stefan Fischer und Elke Teich"Uhura: A Benchmark for Evaluating Scientific Question Answering and Truthfulness in Low-Resource African Languages" by Edward Thomas Bayes, Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba Alabi, Jonas… [...]

Numerous papers of our department were accepted at the the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026.
Congratulations to all authors!

“Automata Learning and Identification of the Support of Language Models”
By Satwik Bhattamishra, Michael Hahn, Varun Kanade“Grounding or Guessing? Visual Signals for Detecting Hallucinations in Sign Language Translation.”
By  Yasser Hamidullah, Koel Dutta Chowdury, Yusser Al-Ghussin, Shakib Yazdani, Cennet Oguz, Josef van Genabith, Cristina… [...]

Professor Vera Demberg recently welcomed a group of 30 bachelor's students from the University of Seoul (UoS) to Saarland University and gave a talk as part of their visit under the UoS Career Expedition (UCE). 
The UCE, launched by the University of Seoul as a structured gap-year program, is designed to give students the opportunity to step away from their regular studies, explore their aspirations, and connect experiential learning with long-term career goals. 
During the session, Prof. Demberg…

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