News

With the passing of Dr. Agustín Seguí, Saarland University, and particularly the field of translation theory and practice, mourns the loss of one of its founding figures. Dr. Seguí played a pivotal role in the establishment of the Spanish Department within the former Translation Institute and served as its director for many years. His unwavering commitment to innovation, he never avoided conflict, often spurred progress and change. Dr. Seguí's impact extended far beyond teaching and…

[...]

At the end of September Jörg Knappen, Pauline Krielke and Elke Teich gave a one-week course on corpus linguistics at Kyrgyz-Turkish Manas University (KTMU) in Bishkek (Kyrgystan). The course was attended by around 70 people, including students and teachers from Bishkek, Osh and Karakol universities.

[...]

We are happy to announce that 14 papers by members of our department have been accepted at the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). Congratulations to all authors!

"We're Afraid Language Models Aren't Modeling Ambiguity." by Alisa Liu, Zhaofeng Wu, Julian Michael, Alane Suhr, Peter West, Alexander Koller, Swabha Swayamdipta, Noah A. Smith, Yejin Cho
Long Paper "SLOG: A Structural Generalization Benchmark for Semantic Parsing." by Bingzhi Li, Lucia Donatelli,… [...]

German author, speaker and mental artist, Thorsten Havener studied at the former department "Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft sowie Übersetzen und Dolmetschen". His remarkable journey underscores the potential of language science in achieving exceptional heights.  In an interview with the Campus online magazine, Thorsten Havener offers insights into his profession and reflects on how his studies have shaped his artistic journey. Moreover, he recalls some especially pleasant and enriching moments…

[...]

We are happy to announce that three papers by members of our department have been accepted at the 16th International Natural Language Generation conference (INLG 2023) and the 24th Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDial 2023). Congratulations to all authors!

“Tackling Hallucinations in Neural Chart Summarization” by Saad Obaid ul Islam, Iza Skrjanec, Ondrej Dusek and Vera Demberg. INLG 2023. “Visually Grounded Story Generation Challenge” by Xudong Hong,… [...]

We are delighted to announce that four scientific contributions by members of our department have been accepted at Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing conference (RANLP 2023). Congratulations to all authors!

“Simultaneous Interpreting as a Noisy Channel: How Much Information Gets Through” by Maria Kunilovskaya, Heike Przybyl, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski and Elke Teich. RANLP 2023. “Microsyntactic Unit Detection using Word Embedding Models: Experiments on Slavic Languages” by… [...]

We are proud to announce that multiple members of our department have won different awards at the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023). Congratulations to all authors!

Best Theme Paper Award for Dawei Zhu, Xiaoyu Shen, Marius Mosbach, Andreas Stephan und Dietrich Klakow: "Weaker Than You Think: A Critical Look at Weakly Supervised Learning". ACL 2023 (Toronto, Canada). Outstanding Paper Award for Simone Tedeschi, Johan Bos, Thierry Declerck, Jan… [...]

Thierry Declerck, a long-time DFKI employee in the MLT research area and lecturer in our department for many years, passed away suddenly on June 27 at the age of 64. He suffered a severe heart attack during a business trip in the Czech Republic and unfortunately did not survive. We are immensely saddened and stunned to lose such a knowledgeable and kind colleague who did so much for our department and who was greatly appreciated by all staff and students.

[...]

The graduation party 2023 of the Humanities Faculty took place on 13 May 2023. The photos from the event are available on this webpage. The next graduation party will be held next year. You can find more information as well as the registration form here.

[...]

Omnia Ibrahim has won the LabPhon best poster award (originality, quality of the research and quality of the presentation) at the Phonetics and Phonology in Europe conference (PaPE 2023) that took place in Nijmegen. Congratulations to all authors!

“The interplay between syllable-based predictability and voicing during closure in intersonorant German stops” by Omnia Ibrahim, Ivan Yuen, Bistra Andreeva and Bernd Möbius. Phonetics and Phonology in Europe 2023 (Nijmegen, the Netherlands).

[...]