Lehrstuhl Demberg

The group of Prof. Dr. Vera Demberg is affiliated with the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Language Science and Technology. 

• Dr. Tiago Pimentel (ETH Zürich) gave a talk “Promises and Limitations of Causality for Machine Learning Interpretability” - the talk of the LangSci Colloquium series - on August 20th at 4:15 pm in hybrid form in room 1.20.2 in A2 2 & via MS Teams.
  You can read the talk abstract here.
• M. Hamza Mughal, Rishabh Dabral, Vera Demberg, and Christian Theobalt won at the 1st International Workshop on IPA 2026 at CVPR 2026 for the paper “MIBURI: Towards Expressive Interactive Gesture Synthesis”
  1) Best Paper Award (the Interactive Physical AI (IPA) Workshop at CVPR 2026)
  2) Best Demo Award (across the CVPR 2026 Main Program)
• Anwesha Das won the Best Student Paper Award at AAMAS 2026 for the paper "Planning Ahead with RSA: Efficient Signalling in Dynamic Environments by Projecting User Awareness across Future Timesteps".
  Co-authors: John Duff, Jörg Hoffmann, and Vera Demberg.
• Iza Škrjanec, Irene Elisabeth Winther, Vera Demberg, and Stefan L. Frank won the Honorable Mention Award at CMCL 2026 for the paper “Is Cross-Lingual Transfer in Bilingual Models Human-Like? A Study with Overlapping Word Forms in Dutch and English”.
• Alexandra Mayn successfully defended her thesis today (June 03, 2026)! Congratulations, Dr. Mayn!
• Dongqi Liu successfully defended his thesis today (May 29, 2026)! Congratulations, Dr. Liu!
• Margarita Ryzhova successfully defended her thesis today (May 26, 2026)! Congratulations, Dr. Ryzhova!
• Prof. Ira Noveck (CNRS & Université de Paris-Cité) gave a talk “Reconfiguring Figurative Language” on June 2, 4:15 p.m. in seminar room 1.12 in building C7 3.
• New research assistant from May 1st, 2026: Welcome to Natalia Bila!
• Xudong Hong successfully defended his thesis today (Feb 27, 2026)! Congratulations, Dr. Hong!
• Prof. Demberg gave a talk to Korean visiting students from the University of Seoul as part of UoS career Expedition.
• Our lab hosted a guest PhD student Yiyi Chen from Aalborg University (Denmark) from February to April 2026.

In the news (selected)

• New article on Racism in AI: Chatbots often not only provide incorrect results—they have also internalized questionable values. It is difficult to train them out of this came out in the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung in German language.
• New article on how code processing in the brain can be understood via psycholinguistic methods, came out in Scientific Reports.
• Please see our new episode on the Podcast "As I see IT"  and a newspaper article about it
• Podcast "Kleins Sprachgespräch" features Vera Demberg in its new episode "Wenn Algorithmen texten -- Wie spricht KI mit uns?" (via spotify)
• We're on TV! (in German)
• Lecture at the children's university (Kinderuni)

Research Topics

• Computational Cognitive Modelling
• Experimental Psycholinguistics
• Information-theoretic Models of Language Processing
• Coherence Relations in Text, Pragmatics
• Natural Language Generation
• Multimodal Language Processing (Language and Vision / Language and Body Language)

Current Projects

• Safe Handover in Mixed-Initiative Control (CPEC: SFB-TR 248, E2; Jan 2019 - Dez 2026)
• Cooperative User Interfaces as Rational Agents (CPEC: SFB-TR 248, E6; Jan 2023 - Dez 2026)
• DFG Research Training Group on Neuroexplicit Models of Language, Vision, and Action (RTG 2853; Oct 2023 - Sep 2028)

Completed Projects

• Cognitive Modelling of Information Density for Discourse Relations (SFB 1102, B2; Oct 2014 - June 2026)
• Adapting text generation to individual users (SFB 1102, A8; July 2022 - June 2026)
• Individualized Interaction in Discourse, (newspaper article) (ERC-STG 948878; Feb 2021- Jan 2026)
• Modelling the Information Density of Event Sequences in Texts (SFB 1102, A3; Oct 2014 - June 2022)
• Language Comprehension and Cognitive Control Demands:  
  Adapting Information Density to Changing Situations and Individual Users (SFB 1102, A4; Oct 2014 - June 2022)