News

The Erasmus Mundus European Master in Language and Communication Technologies (LCT) will hold a virtual summer school for all incoming students of intake 2020. It will take place online from August 24-28, 2020. [...]

Four papers submitted by members of the Phonetics and Language and Digital Signal Processing teams have been accepted for publication and presentation at the Interspeech conference 2020 (Shanghai). [...]

Two Saarbrücken dissertations are among the runners-up for the Beth Award this year:
Jonas Groschwitz, "Methods for taking semantic graphs apart and putting them back together again", Saarland University and Macquarie University.
Merel  Scholman, "Coherence relations in discourse and cognition: Comparing approaches, annotations, and interpretations", Saarland University.
Congratulations to both for this achievement! [...]

An article on "Language service provision in the 21st century: challenges, opportunities and educational perspectives for translation studies" (co-authors Josef van Genabith, Erich Steiner, Elke Teich) was recently published in a highly selective volume on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Bologna process. [...]

This year, LST joins "UniCamp" with a workshop held by Pauline Krielke and Dr. Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb. 20 girls will be getting fascinating insights into corpus linguistics. On July 24 using linguistic and computational techniques, Pauline Krielke will guide the girls through the multilingual realm of Harry Potter wizardry. [...]

Ben Posner (BSc student) was accepted to the Saarbrücken Round Table of Dialect S­yntax, to be held in November. Ben will present work for his BSc thesis on "Cross-serial dependencies and similar structures in the Saarland dialect." [...]

Two MSc students will present work at WeSSLLI 2020. Iuliia Zaitova will present her work on "Analyzing and Comparing Speech Disfluency Patterns in Non-Native Dialogue: A Qualitative Case Study." Wan Ching Ho (Clara) will present her work on "Hello Siri, Why Don't You Understand? - A Study on Grounding of Human and Agent Interlocutors in Dialogues." [...]

Alexander Koller will present at the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2020) with co-author Emily Bender. The paper, "Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data," features a savvy octopus and is also available in audio form.
A total of 9 papers from DFKI and UdS with Tianjin University and University of Washington were accepted for ACL2020: Christoph Alt, Aleksandra Gabryszak and Leonhard Hennig. "Probing Linguistic… [...]

Arne Köhn will present a joint paper at the 21st Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2020). The paper is "MC-Saar-Instruct: a Platform for Minecraft Instruction Giving Agents," co-authored by Julia Wichlacz, Christine Schäfer, Álvaro Torralba, Jörg Hoffmann and Alexander Koller. [...]

This year’s annual meeting of the Erasmus Mundus Master’s course “Language and Communication Technologies” (originally planned in Saarbrücken) took place as a virtual online meeting on 25th and 26th of June due to the pandemic.
Following the words of welcome by the President of the University Prof. Manfred Schmitt and Prof. Josef van Genabith (project coordinator), Dr. Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová (project manager) opened the Annual Meeting. Nine students presented their final project in three… [...]