News

We are happy to announce a new double degree partnership between the MA programme "Translation Science and Technology" and the University of Lorraine in Metz. Starting in the winter semester 2025/26, this collaboration will enable the annual exchange of two students from each institution.

At the University of Lorraine, our partner programme is Technologies de la traduction. Students from Saarland University who choose the double degree option will spend one academic year in France, where they…

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At the beginning of May, the Department of Language Science and Technology joined the International Network of Simulated Translation Bureaus (INSTB). 
The INSTB is a partnership of currently 23 universities from all over Europe with the goal of exchanging and further developing know-how and ideas on the topic of practice-oriented translator training. All members have modules in their study programmes that simulate real-life conditions in a translation project, from customer contact, project…

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We are happy to announce that our department has 7 contributions accepted at Syntax Fest, R2CASS (International Workshop on Computational Reproducibility in Social Sciences), DISS Workshop (Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech) and UCCTS conference (Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies). Congratulations to all authors!

"Syntactic complexity in Scientific English: A diachronic perspective" by Marie-Pauline Krielke, Diego Alves and Luigi Talamo (Syntax Fest 2025, Paper)."The Interplay… [...]

On 30 May 2025, an article appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung which explores the question of why speech sounds change in some regions and remain stable in others. Felicitas Kleber, Professor of Speech Science at Saarland University's Language Science and Technology Department, has been interviewed for this article given her expertise in phonetics, diachronic sound change in general and synchronic variation in Bavarian in particular.

The full article is available here.

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Our department has five contributions accepted at ICML 2025, CVPR 2025 and CogSci 2025. Congratulations to all authors!

“Lower Bounds for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Hard-Attention Transformers.”
by Alireza Amiri, Xinting Huang, Mark Rofin and Michael Hahn. (Proceedings of ICML 2025.)“An ACT-R model of resource-rational performance in a pragmatic reference game.”
by Alexandra Mayn, Jack Duff and Vera Demberg. (Proceedings of CogSci 2025.)“People do not engage in ad-hoc reasoning about… [...]

Numerous scientific publications from our department were accepted at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Congratulations to all authors!

ACL

“LLMs instead of Human Judges? A Large Scale Empirical Study across 20 NLP Evaluation Tasks.”
by Anna Bavaresco, Raffaella Bernardi, Leonardo Bertolazzi, Desmond Elliott, Raquel Fernández, Albert Gatt, Esam Ghaleb, Mario Giulianelli, Michael Hanna, Alexander Koller, André F. T. Martins, Philipp Mondorf, Vera… [...]

On Saturday, 24 May 2025 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saarland University will present its study programmes at the Open House Day.
We will be participating with a wide selection of topics, giving a look behind the scenes of our department, which offers innovative study programmes as well as interesting research projects. You are welcome to visit our information stands and talks and to take part in our interactive activities!

Our activities

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We are proud to announce that the paper “MultiCoPIE: A Multilingual Corpus of Potentially Idiomatic Expressions for Cross-lingual PIE Disambiguation" by Uliana Sentsova, Debora Ciminari, Josef Van Genabith and Cristina España-Bonet has won best paper award at the 21st Workshop on Multiword Expressions @ NAACL 2025.

Congratulations to all authors!

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For the second time in a row, the Spanish department organized an excursion to Alicante under the supervision of Dr. Rosario Herrero and in cooperation with the Sprachenzentrum. 13 students went on the trip, which gave them the opportunity to immerse themselves in the Spanish culture for a week, practice their language skills on site and get to know student life in Spain.

The University of Alicante is a partner university of Saarland University. The two universities jointly offer a double…

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Dr. Nurgul Karybekova and Dr.  Jumagul Nurakun Kyzy, lecturers from Kyrgyz-Turkish Manas University (Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan), have visited our department and given two lectures during their stay at the UdS:

‘DH and Kyrgyz Oral Literature: New Perspectives Enabled by the Kyrgyz Corpus Project at Saarland University’ (Dr Nurgul Karybekova);‘Kyrgyz NLP in the Era of AI: Opportunities and Obstacles’ (Dr Jumagul Nurakun Kyzy).

The visit was part of the KA171 ERASMUS cooperation between the two…

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