Computational Linguistics Department in Saarbrücken

Computational linguistics in Saarbrücken is rooted in a tradition of research going back to the beginning of the seventies. Interdisciplinary work started with a cluster of projects that were funded from 1973 until 1986 by the German Research Association (DFG) as the SFB 100 “Elektronische Sprachforschung.” These projects performed pioneering work in Germany and, in effect, prepared the ground for our discipline.

Saarbrücken also was the location for the German partner project of EUROTRA (1982–1993), a large European research effort in machine translation. In 1985, the AI Lab in the Computer Science Deptartement was established, that became the home of advanced research in language technology, user modelling and multimodal interfaces.

In 1988, the first Chair of Computational Linguistics was appointed, who built up the Department of General Linguistics which in practice developed into a Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics. The department was soon complemented by the Language Technology Lab at DFKI (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) founded in 1989.

Today, the department has five tenured professor positions (chairs) and a research and teaching staff of about 30, the LT Lab at DFKI has a staff of 40. The Department offers Master and doctoral programs in computational lingusitics as well as M.Sc. and doctoral programs in Phonetics. It provides the academic focal point for numerous research activities in computational linguistics and language technology that are carried out at several university departments and other research centers. It also hosts major scientific conferences and summer schools as well as regular colloquia with renowned international speakers.

Technical Facilities

State of the art computing infrastructure
Computer lab with facilities for the visually impaired
Eyetracking lab
Speech labs
Dialog and usability lab
Video conferencing lab
In-house Institute library