News

The Department of Language Science and Technology at the Saarland University is gaining a new professor: On October 1, 2026, Marius Mosbach will join the department as Professor of Language Science and Technology and build a new research group. [...]

Of the mere five ERC Starting Grants awarded to Germany in the field of computer science, one has gone to Saarbrücken-based computational linguist Michael Hahn. With his research project “REALM: Foundations for Reliable Language Model Reasoning via Inductive Biases,” he aims to make AI more reliable, efficient, and trustworthy. [...]

On August 26, 2026, three representatives from the department visited the Otto-Hahn-Gymnasium in Saarbrücken to present the Bachelor’s program in Language Science and the Language Science and Technology department to interested students during the Career Information Day. [...]

Numerous scientific publications from our department were accepted at the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) .
Congratulations to all authors!

„FineWeb-CLaR: Culture, Language, and Region Annotations for Benchmark-Aligned Corpus Auditing“
by Yusser Al Ghussin, Eva Gavaller, Cristina España-Bonet, Josef van Genabith, Simon Ostermann„When Tokenization is Secretly Output Supervision“ 
by Tanja Baeumel, Josef van Genabith, Simon Ostermann„Want Better Synthetic Data? Steer It:… [...]

We are proud to announce that an ACL paper from our department has been honored with an Outstanding Paper Award.

"Systematicity between Forms and Meanings across Languages Supports Efficient Communication"
by Doreen Osmelak, Yang Xu, Michael Hahn, and Kate McCurdy.

Congratulations to Doreen Osmelak and her co-authors!

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Three papers from our department have been accepted for the  Conference on Language Models (COLM) 2026. Congratulations to all authors!

“When Contextual Inference Fails: Cancelability in Interactive Instruction Following” by
Natalia Bila, Kata Naszadi, Alexandra Mayn, Christof Monz. 
 “Barriers to Universal Reasoning With Transformers (And How to Overcome Them)” by
Oliver Kraus, Yash Sarrof, Yuekun Yao, Alexander Koller, Michael Hahn. 
 “Algebraic Decomposition Theory for Transformer Length… [...]

On May, 15 2026 a new paper from Annemarie Verkerk and Luigi Talamo appeared in "Linguistics": 
"They saw it, onu, 它, coming: an information-theoretic study of cross-linguistic variation in personal pronouns". 

This paper is a SFB 1102 collaboration with  Julius Steuer , now at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, where the surprisal of personal pronouns (Engl: she, you, they, ...; Germ: sie, wir, du, ...) was assessed in seventeen languages from around the world. The authors find…

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We are proud to announce that four papers from our department have won awards in various categories.
Congratulations to all the authors!

Best Paper Award bei CMCL  2026
“Correlating Language Model Surprisal With Cloze and Plausibility: Getting the Best of Both Measures”. By
Kate Rebecca Belcher, Matthew W. Crocker. 
 Honorable Mention Award at  CMCL 2026
“Is Cross-Lingual Transfer in Bilingual Models Human-Like? A Study with Overlapping Word Forms in Dutch and English” By
Iza Škrjanec, Irene… [...]

Two scientific publications from our department were accepted at   Interspeech 2026. Congratulations to both authors!

“Multimodal Jailbreaks for Multimodal LLMs” by
Aravind Krishnan, Karolina Stańcza, Dietrich Klakow"How do word frequency and syllable surprisal affect response time and acoustic duration in sentence formulation?" by
Ivan Yuen, Bernd Möbius, Bistra Andreeva, Mitko Sabev [...]

Numerous scientific publications from our department were accepted at the the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
Congratulations to all authors!

“Provably Learning Attention with Queries” by
Satwik Bhattamishra, Kulin Shah, Michael Hahn, Varun Kanade.“Discovering Interpretable Algorithms by Decompiling Transformers to RASP” by
Xinting Huang, Aleksandra Bakalova, Satwik Bhattamishra, William Merrill, Michael Hahn.“A Framework for Understanding Learnability in Transformers” by
Blanka… [...]