News

Artificial intelligence has become an integral part of everyday (working) life. However, AI-based systems – for example, those used to improve medical diagnoses – have one major shortcoming: they are based on statistical patterns and cannot ‘understand’ how cause and effect are related, unlike humans. Newly appointed professor Sara Magliacane aims to fill this gap with her research: ‘We often don't know exactly what the neural networks in the background of an AI-supported system are calculating,…

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Around 40,000 years ago, our early ancestors carved symbols into tools and sculptures to record and share their thoughts: lines, dots, notches or crosses that were often repeated. For Christian Bentz, Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Language Technology at Saarland University, it is clear: ‘An early alternative to writing’. As part of the research project The Evolution of Visual Information Encoding (EVINE), which is funded by the European Research Council with an…

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The Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM) reports on this here.
We congratulate Prof. Dr. Demberg on this achievement!

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Numerous papers of our department were accepted at the   Language Resources and Evaluation Conference  LREC (2026).
Congratulations to all authors!

"Using LLMs for Automatic Discipline Annotation in a Diachronic Corpus of English Scientific Papers" by Sergei Bagdasarov, Diego Alves, Stefan Fischer und Elke Teich"Uhura: A Benchmark for Evaluating Scientific Question Answering and Truthfulness in Low-Resource African Languages" by Edward Thomas Bayes, Israel Abebe Azime, Jesujoba Alabi, Jonas… [...]

Numerous papers of our department were accepted at the the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026.
Congratulations to all authors!

“Automata Learning and Identification of the Support of Language Models”
By Satwik Bhattamishra, Michael Hahn, Varun Kanade“Grounding or Guessing? Visual Signals for Detecting Hallucinations in Sign Language Translation.”
By  Yasser Hamidullah, Koel Dutta Chowdury, Yusser Al-Ghussin, Shakib Yazdani, Cennet Oguz, Josef van Genabith, Cristina… [...]

Professor Vera Demberg recently welcomed a group of 30 bachelor's students from the University of Seoul (UoS) to Saarland University and gave a talk as part of their visit under the UoS Career Expedition (UCE). 
The UCE, launched by the University of Seoul as a structured gap-year program, is designed to give students the opportunity to step away from their regular studies, explore their aspirations, and connect experiential learning with long-term career goals. 
During the session, Prof. Demberg…

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On 9 January 2026, Marlies Wulf, Head of the United Nations German Translation Service in New York, gave an overview of the tasks of the service and its working methods.
She also presented the new recruitment procedure for German translators, which has now been officially launched. Details can be found in the announcement. Additional information on the selection procedures for the United Nations Language Services is also available on the UN Careers portal and on the website of the Department for…

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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… [...]

Both the SIC and the Campus Magazine report on this.
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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