News

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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We are proud to announce that the paper "TenseLoC: Tense Localization and Control in a Multilingual LLM"by Ariun-Erdene Tumurchuluun, Yusser Al Ghussin, David Mareček, Josef Van Genabith, Koel Dutta Chowdhury has won the best paper award at MRL 2025 WS at Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2025.
Congratulations to  Ariun-Erdene Tumurchuluun, Yusser Al Ghussin and their co-authors! 

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The German Research Foundation (DFG) is funding Michael Hahn’s research group with up to €1.4 million.

Through the Emmy Noether Programme, Michael Hahn receives a prestigious grant to establish his own research group. The project will develop new machine learning architectures for artificial intelligence.

Current large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are based on the Transformer architecture, which can fundamentally limit their logical reasoning abilities. Hahn’s group will design new…

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Erich Steiner, retired professor of English translation studies in our department, gave an invited lecture to the Philological Society of England  at University College London on 17 October 2025 on the topic of "Agency in translation: some ideological battles and their implications for (machine-) translation".

A video of the talk is available on the society's website or here.

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Six research papers from our department have been accepted for presentation at the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing & Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (IJCNLP-AACL 2025).
Congratulations to all authors!

Main conference:

“Language Arithmetics: Towards Systematic Language Neuron Identification and Manipulation”
by Daniil Gurgurov, Katharina Trinley, Yusser Al Ghussin, Tanja Baeumel, Josef van Genabith, Simon Ostermann“ProofTeller:… [...]