Lehrs­tuhl Dem­berg

The group of Prof. Dr. Vera Demberg is affiliated with the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Language Science and Technology. 

• Marian Marchal successfully defended her thesis today (March 13, 2025)! Congratulations, Dr. Marchal!
• Anupama Chingacham successfully defended her thesis today (Dec 9, 2024)! Congratulations, Dr. Chingacham!
• The Workshop on Individual Differences in Reading (IndiREAD) organized by our lab will take place at Saarland University on November 26-27, 2025. Fore more information, please, visit the workshop website.
• Runyi Yao (Oxford University, UK) gave a talk “Establishing causal relations in discourse processing” within the ERC-IDDISC project on November 25th, 2024, from 13:00 to 14:00 in building C7.2, conference room 2.11. The talk details are here.
• The workshop “Generalized additive mixed-effects modeling” taught by Joshua Krause (University of Groningen, Netherlands) within the ERC-IDDISC project took place on November 5th and 6th, 2024 from 9:00 to 14:30 in C7.2, meeting room 2.11. The workshop details are here.
• Joshua Krause (University of Groningen, Netherlands) gave a talk on Unraveling latent cognitive progresses: A new Approach for modeling experimental effects within the ERC-IDDISC project on November 5th, 2024, from 15:00 to 16:00 in building C7 4, conference room 1.17. The talk details are here.
• Our lab are hosting a guest master student Florence Yiming Liu from the University of Utrecht (The Netherlands) from November 2024 to January 2025.
• Our lab are hosting a guest doctoral student from the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) from September to November 2024: Welcome to Kata Naszádi!
• Our lab hosted guest doctoral student Oksana Ivchenko from Université de Lille (France) from June to July  2024!
• Our lab hosted guest doctoral student Markéta Ceháková from Charles University (Czech Republic) in March 2024!
• Prof. Vera Demberg has been elected as a member of the academy of sciences and literature Mainz.
• Prof. Vera Demberg has been awarded a Max Planck Fellowship at the MPI for Informatics -- from Jan 2024, she will also lead the research group on "Multimodal Language Processing" there.

In the news (selected)

• Please see our new episode on the Podcast "As I see IT"  and a newspaper article about it
• Podcast "Kleins Sprachgespräch" features Vera Demberg in its new episode "Wenn Algorithmen texten -- Wie spricht KI mit uns?" (via spotify)
• We're on TV! (in German)
• Lecture at the children's university (Kinderuni)

Research Topics

• Computational Cognitive Modelling
• Experimental Psycholinguistics
• Information-theoretic Models of Language Processing
• Coherence Relations in Text, Pragmatics
• Natural Language Generation
• Multimodal Language Processing (Language and Vision / Language and Body Language)

Current Projects

• Individualized Interaction in Discourse, (newspaper article) (ERC-STG 948878; Feb 2021- Jan 2026)
• Cognitive Modelling of Information Density for Discourse Relations (SFB 1102, B2; Oct 2014 - June 2026)
• Adapting text generation to individual users (SFB 1102, A8; July 2022 - June 2026)
• Safe Handover in Mixed-Initiative Control (SFB - TR 248, E2; Jan 2019 - Dez 2026)
• Cooperative User Interfaces as Rational Agents (SFB - TR 248, E6; Jan 2023 - Dez 2026)
• DFG Research Training Group on Neuroexplicit Models of Language, Vision, and Action (RTG 2853; Oct 2023 - Sep 2028)

Completed Projects

• Modelling the Information Density of Event Sequences in Texts (SFB 1102, A3; Oct 2014 - June 2022)
• Language Comprehension and Cognitive Control Demands:  
  Adapting Information Density to Changing Situations and Individual Users (SFB 1102, A4; Oct 2014 - June 2022)