News

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… [...]

The article "Phonetic accommodation in interaction with a virtual language learning tutor: A Wizard-of-Oz study" by Iona Gessinger, Bernd Möbius, Sébastien Le Maguer, Eran Raveh, and Ingmar Steiner was published in Journal of Phonetics and is available online.
The article investigates phonetic accommodation of German native speakers in interaction with the simulated spoken dialog system Mirabella. Two versions of Mirabella are compared: one uses pre-recorded speech and the other synthesized… [...]

Article in the CAMPUS web magazine about an exciting research project by Master's student Johannes Bernhard as part of his Master's thesis in the study programme "Language Science and Technology": Computer linguist reassembles ancient clay tablets. [...]

Four scientific contributions of our department were accepted for EACL. Congratulations to all authors! "Does the Order of Training Samples Matter? Improving Neural Data-to-Text Generation with Curriculum Learning" (Short Paper), authors: Ernie Chang, Hui-Syuan Yeh and Vera Demberg "Neural Data-to-Text Generation with LM-based Text Augmentation" (Long Paper), authors: Ernie Chang, Xiaoyu Shen, Dawei Zhu, Vera Demberg and Hui Su "Jointly Improving Language Understanding and Language… [...]

The article "Phonetic Accommodation to Natural and Synthetic Voices: Behavior of Groups and Individuals in Speech Shadowing" by Iona Gessinger, Eran Raveh, Ingmar Steiner, and Bernd Möbius was published in Speech Communication and is available online. [...]

Dr. Ryuko Woirgardt, geb. Kobayashi, die in unserer Fachrichtung und am Sprachenzentrum der Universität langjährig als Lektorin für Japanisch tätig war, ist am 26. November 2020 im Alter von 79 Jahren verstorben.

Ryuko Kobayashi kam Anfang der Sechziger Jahre für ein Studium der Sozialarbeit nach Hannover. Bei einem Ferienaufenthalt im Saarland lernte sie ihren späteren Mann kennen und zog nach dem Studium ins Saarland. Sie bekam zwei Kinder, war als Sozialarbeiterin, dann als Lehrerin tätig… [...]

Iona Gessinger and Eran Raveh received a best student paper award for their Interspeech 2020 paper:
Iona Gessinger, Bernd Möbius, Bistra Andreeva, Eran Raveh, Ingmar Steiner (2020): "Phonetic accommodation of L2 German speakers to the virtual language learning tutor Mirabella". Interspeech 2020 (Shanghai), 4118-4122.
DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2020-2701

Congratulations, Iona and Eran!

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The volume "Voice Attractiveness -- Studies on Sexy, Likable, and Charismatic Speakers" has been published with the co-editorship of Saarbrücken phoneticians. The book shows a collection of 17 contributions on diverse aspects of attractive voices - from evolutionary preferences to technological applications. It was edited by Benjamin Weiss, Jürgen Trouvain, Melissa Barkat-Defradas and John J. Ohala. [...]

Application is now OPEN for intake 2021, for European and non-European applicants. All correct, complete and timely applications will additionally be considered for award of the Erasmus Mundus scholarship. For more information, visit the home page here:  https://lct-master.org/ [...]