Research Projects

CHORUS is concerned with semantic processing of ambiguous natural language utterances. It aims at combining underspecification techniques and preferences.

CORTE deals with the automatic recognition, extraction and processing of definitions in German court decisions by use of linguistic technology.

Dialog empirically investigates flexible dialogue management strategies in complex mathematics tutoring dialogues and develops an experimental prototype system gradually embodying the empirical findings.

SALSA creates a semantically annotated corpus resource and investigates methods for its utilisation.

TALK This project aims to generalise the TRINDI and SIRIDUS "Information State Update" (ISU) approach to dialogue management to develop adaptive multimodal dialogue systems. We also extend the use of abstract representations, in particular the use of domain ontologies, to increase robustness and reconfigurability of dialogue systems. Showcases for in-car and in-home information and control are being developed.

Recently Finished

InDiGen aims at developing an integrated approach to discourse and sentence planning which captures the interaction of discourse marker selection, ellipsis, and discourse structure. The project focuses on empirical investigations and the formalization of the corresponding linguistic and non-linguistic constraints, as well as the declarative modelling and implementation of those constraints by means of first order logic theorem proving and expressive concurrent constraint languages.

COLLATE is a joint effort of the DFKI, Department for Computational Linguistics & Phonetics and the Department for Computer Science at Saarland University to establish a German competence center for language technology in Saarbruecken.

MiLCA is a joint project on e-learning, in which different computational linguistics locations interlace their curricula by a variety of virtual courses. MiLCA Saarbrücken develops teaching material on Computational Semantics, Algorithms for Natural Language Processing, and Dialogue Processing.

SIRIDUS aims at scientific and technological advances in spoken language dialogue systems. The central objective is to expand our understanding of and develop computational tools to support the development of more robust, functional and user-friendly dialogue systems.