News

We are very excited to announce that our department has six papers accepted at Interspeech 2021, covering different areas in speech science and technology. Congratulations to all authors! Beeke Muhlack, Mikey Elmers, Heiner Drenhaus, Juergen Trouvain, Marjolein van Os, Raphael Werner, Margarita Ryzhova and Bernd Möbius: Revisiting recall effects of filler particles in German and English. Raphael Werner, Susanne Fuchs, Juergen Trouvain and Bernd Möbius: Inhalations in speech: acoustic and… [...]

A new article of our psycholinguistics group was published in Brain Research: “When components collide: Spatiotemporal overlap of the N400 and P600 in language comprehension.” Francesca Delogu, Harm Brouwer, Matthew W. Crocker.
Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brai. [...]

Two student papers were accepted at the Inter-NLP workshop, the first workshop on Interactive Learning for Natural Language Processing. Luisa Geiger, Leonie Harter, and Katharina Stein will present "SHAPELURN: An Interactive Language Learning Game with Logical Inference." Susann Boy, AriaRay Brown, & Morgan Wixted will present "Apple Core-dination: Linguistic Feedback and Learning in a Speech-to-Action Shared World Game." Both groups developed their projects in the software project, "Language,… [...]

The Saarland University’s Committee of Education has reaccredited the study programmes of our department until 30.09.2028. This includes the following study programmes: Language Science (B.A.) Computational Linguistics (B.Sc.) Phonetics (B.A.) Translation Science and Technology (M.A.) Language Science and Technology (M.Sc.) [...]

A recently produced video provides insights into the Language Science study programme. With Language Processing and Phonetics, two main fields of this interdisciplinary and innovative study programme are presented. The other two specialisations of European Languages and Translation will soon be featured in a follow up video. [...]

The Künstliche Intelligenz (KI, German Journal of Artificial Intelligence) Special Issue on NLP and Semantics features two LST affiliates: Lucia Donatelli, postdoctoral researcher, as guest editor of the issue; and Professor Alexander Koller in an interview about the current state of semantics in NLP. A link to the interview can be found here. A special launch event will be held on June 2. Those interested can contact Lucia at donatelli@coli.uni-saarland.de for further information. [...]

Six scientific contributions of our department were accepted for ACL-IJCNLP 2021. Congratulations to all authors!

Ernie Chang, Xiaoyu Shen, Hui-Syuan Yeh and Vera Demberg.
On Training Instance Selection for Few-Shot Neural Text Generation.

Rashad Albo Jamara, Nico Herbig, Antonio Krüger and Josef van Genabith.
Mid-Air Hand Gestures for Post-Editing of Machine Translation. (DFKI & UdS)

Wei Shi and Vera Demberg.
Entity Enhancement for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification in the Biomedical… [...]

Under the direction of Jun. Prof. Annemarie Verkerk, our department will participate in tomorrow's Girl's Day. The interactive presentation "Ein Blick in die Linguistik: Schnittstelle zwischen Sprachforschung, Informatik und Psychologie" is aimed at all schoolgirls from German grade 5. [...]

Two scientific contributions of our department were accepted for NAACL-HLT 2021. Congratulations to all authors!

Hongfei Xu, Josef van Genabith, Qiuhui Liu, Deyi Xiong. Probing Word Translations in the Transformer and Trading Decoder for Encoder Layers. (DFKI & UdS)

Michael A. Hedderich, Lukas Lange, Heike Adel, Jannik Strötgen, Dietrich Klakow. A Survey on Recent Approaches for Natural Language Processing in Low-Resource Scenarios. [...]

"When this Covid-19 pandemic happened, there was a sudden need to translate basic health tips into many languages. And we couldn't do this with machine translation models, because of the quality," says David Ifeoluwa Adelani, doctoral student in computer science at Saarland University, in a recently published BBC-article on machine translation. According to him, this has shown the need for translation technology that works for low-resource languages, especially in times of need.

David has been… [...]