News

On January 6, 2026, an article was published in the Saarbrücker Zeitung addressing the potential of errors in large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. Prof. Dr. Michael Hahn is quoted as an expert and argues for a fundamental improvement of large language models. The full article is available here. 
 

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We are happy to announce that several contributions by members of our department have been accepted at EACL 2026. Congratulations to all authors!

Main conference  - EACL 2026

“Tug-of-war between idioms' figurative and literal interpretations in LLMs” by
Soyoung Oh, Xinting Huang, Mathis Pink, Michael Hahn, Vera Demberg"When Flores Bloomz Wrong: An Analysis of Cross-Lingual Contamination in Machine Translation Evaluation" by
David Tan, Pinzhen Chen, Josef van Genabith, Koel Dutta Chowdhury“Assess… [...]

Marlies Wulf is Head of the United Nations German Translation Service in New York, gave an overview of the work of the service and its working methods.
She also outlined the new recruitment procedure for German translators, which is due to be launched in 2026.
We would like to thank Ms Wulf for her informative presentation and for the valuable insights she shared into the work of the United Nations German Translation Service.

 

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SIC reports on it here.
We congratulate him sincerely!

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The German Research Council (DFG) und the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) accepted to fund a new collaborative project with the participation of our department. The two-year project "Breathing behaviour in non-lexical vocalisations in talk-in-interaction" will start in March 2026. The Principal Investigators Richard Ogden (University of York) and Jürgen Trouvain (Saarland University) will be supported by two post-doc researchers.
 

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Ekaterina (Katya) Shepel started at the beginning of this month her work as PhD student and researcher at the Chair of Speech Science. Recently, she finished her Master in Language Science (with a focus on phonetics and phonology) at Université Paris Cité.
 

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We are pleased to announce that the SAARTEC project, based at the Chair of English Linguistics and Translation Studies of our department, has been awarded start-up funding from Saarland University. The project will begin in January 2026 and will run for 12 months, structured into five working phases. A total of approximately 15.000 EUR has been granted to support its development.

SAARTEC aims to build a naturalistic-eye-tracking-while-reading corpus of English scientific texts that will provide…

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The student councils of LST and Computer Science jointly organized a torchlight procession to honor Professor Doctor Alexander Koller, supported by the Freunde der Saarbrücker Informatik (FdSI) and Friends of LST. The aim was to convince the professor, who has received a call from another university, to continue his teaching and research at Saarland University. 
SIC reports about it here.

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On November 30, the Saarbrücker Zeitung published an article about the trustworthiness of AI-generated data. Prof. Alexander Koller is quoted as an expert in the field of computational linguistics and spokesman for the GRK “Neuroexplicit Models of Language, Vision, and Action.”
The full article is available here.

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The article “Enduring constraints on grammar revealed by Bayesian spatiophylogenetic analyses” with Annemarie Verkerk as first author was published in the journal “Nature Human Behaviour".
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology reports on it here. UdS report on it here.
Congratulations to Annemarie Verkerk and her co-authors!

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