News

Thierry Declerck, a long-time DFKI employee in the MLT research area and lecturer in our department for many years, passed away suddenly on June 27 at the age of 64. He suffered a severe heart attack during a business trip in the Czech Republic and unfortunately did not survive. We are immensely saddened and stunned to lose such a knowledgeable and kind colleague who did so much for our department and who was greatly appreciated by all staff and students.

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The graduation party 2023 of the Humanities Faculty took place on 13 May 2023. The photos from the event are available on this webpage. The next graduation party will be held next year. You can find more information as well as the registration form here.

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Omnia Ibrahim has won the LabPhon best poster award (originality, quality of the research and quality of the presentation) at the Phonetics and Phonology in Europe conference (PaPE 2023) that took place in Nijmegen. Congratulations to all authors!

“The interplay between syllable-based predictability and voicing during closure in intersonorant German stops” by Omnia Ibrahim, Ivan Yuen, Bistra Andreeva and Bernd Möbius. Phonetics and Phonology in Europe 2023 (Nijmegen, the Netherlands).

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We are happy to announce that five papers by members of our department have been accepted at Interspeech 2023. Congratulations to all authors!

"Self-supervised discrete representations of speech reflect phonetic variability: An information-theoretic analysis" by Badr Abdullah, Mohammed Maqsood Shaik, Bernd Möbius and Dietrich Klakow. Interspeech 2023 (Dublin, Ireland). "Cross-linguistic emotion perception in human and TTS voices" by Iona Gessinger, Michelle Cohn, Benjamin R. Cowan, Georgia… [...]

The German Research Foundation (DFG) will fund the new research training group (RTG) “Neuroexplicit Models of Language, Vision, and Action”. The funding, which amounts to approximately 7.5 million euros, will start in Autumn 2023 and is initially planned for the next five years. Prof. Alexander Koller is the designated speaker of the new RTG. We congratulate all participants on this amazing achievement!
The full article of the press and public relations team of the UdS is available here.

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We are happy to announce that ten papers by members of our department have been accepted at ACL 2023. Congratulations to all authors!

“AfricaPOS: Part-of-Speech Tagging for Typologically Diverse African languages” by Cheikh M. Bamba Dione, David Adelani, Peter Nabende,  Jesujoba Alabi, Thapelo Sindane, Happy Buzaaba, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Chris Chinenye Emezue, Perez Ogayo, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Catherine Gitau, Derguene Mbaye, Jonathan Mukiibi, Blessing Sibanda, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou,… [...]

We are happy to announce that a paper by a member of our department has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Phonetics. Congratulations to the author!

“Unstressed vowel reduction and contrast neutralisation in western and eastern Bulgarian: A current appraisal” by Mitko Sabev

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On Saturday, 13 May 2022 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saarland University will present its study programmes at the Open House Day.
We will be participating with a wide selection of topics, giving a look behind the scenes of our department, which offers innovative study programmes as well as interesting research projects. You are welcome to visit our information stands and talks and to take part in our interactive activities!

Our activities

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Dr. William John Barry, former Professor for Phonetics at the Saarland University, celebrated his 80th birthday anniversary in London on 17 April. During his presence at our university, he worked at the interface between phonetics, language science and language technology focusing particularly on phonetic production and perception as well as on the phonetic aspects of language technology. Our department would like to wish Dr. William John Barry all the best and happy birthday!

Find out more

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We are delighted to announce that seven scientific contributions by members of our department have been accepted at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2023. Congratulations to all authors!

“Pause Particles Influencing Recollection in Lectures” by Mikey Elmers. ICPhS 2023. “Vowel Reduction in Spontaneous Bulgarian Judeo-Spanish” by Jonas Grünke, Mitko Sabev, Christoph Gabriel, and Bistra Andreeva. ICPhS 2023. "Respiratory and Supralaryngeal Effects on Speech Breathing Noise… [...]