News

The German Research Foundation (DFG) has granted a three year extension of their funding for the research project "Phonetic convergence in human-computer interaction (CHIC)", directed by Prof. Bernd Möbius and Dr. Ingmar Steiner.

Phonetic convergence is an increase in similarity of the speech patterns of two interlocutors in communicative interaction. In the first year of funding we have demonstrated that human experimental subjects show patterns of phonetic convergence when being exposed to… [...]

Within the framework of the INTERREG "Digital Stones" project, a colloquium on the film cultural heritage of the Greater Region will take place from 13 to 15 November, 2017. The conference will deal with the accessibility, preservation and use of the film heritage and the film archive situation of the Greater Region.
In cooperation between the Saarland Film Office and Saarland University. [...]

The "Writing Systems"  exhibition will be on display in the foyer of building C7 3 from 19 October, 2017.
It gives an overview of the writing systems of different languages: Alphabets focus on vowels and consonants, other systems on syllables, others on morphemes, but also signs and melody are notated. Other exhibits deal with secret writing, artificial languages and technical aspects of written language encoding.
The exhibition is the result of a seminar of the same name and is organised by… [...]

Saarbrücken Computational Linguistics, now part of the Department of Linguistics and Language Technology, celebrates its 25th anniversary on October 28, 2017. The event will be celebrated with a big party in the assembly hall on the Saarbrücken campus.
Further information can be found on the anniversary website.

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The German Research Foundation (DFG) has granted a three year extension of their funding for Prof. Alexander Koller's research project "Efficient statistical parsing and translation for expressive grammatical formalisms with tree automata". The first phase of this project investigated algorithms to make a general grammar formalism so efficient that it could be used as a drop in for more specialized implementations. The second phase will focus on reaching state-of-the-art performance in many… [...]

Manfred Pinkal's group is organizing a shared task at next year's SemEval, officially titled "SemEval 2018 Shared Task 11: Machine Comprehension using Commonsense Knowledge". As in other machine comprehension tasks, reading texts will be provided together with multiple choice questions. Participating systems have to pick the correct answer to each question, given the reading text. In contrast to previous machine comprehension tasks, this task will require a model to make use of commonsense… [...]

Making effective use of metadata of historical texts and corpora [...]

Read more in the CAMPUS article. [...]

Vera Demberg and Heiner Drenhaus explained all kinds of tricks that our brain plays when processing language at the Children's University on 6 May 2015. [...]