What's New at the Institute?

June 2019

ACL 2019 publications: The department has 4 long papers and 3 short papers accepted by ACL 2019!

May 2019

Welcome Ernie Chang!: Ernie Chang joins Vera Demberg's group as a doctoral researcher. As a member of the new Collaborative Research Center 248 (Foundations of Perspicuous Software Systems), he will work in the E2 project which focuses on Safe Handover in Mixed-Initiative Control. Prior to joining the SFB, he was working in the industry on projects related to speech and voice assistants. He received a master degree in Computational Linguistics from University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.

April 2019

Visiting Researcher Ludivine Crible: Ludivine Crible (ludivine.crible@uclouvain.be) from Universite Catholique de Louvain is visiting Vera Demberg's group. Her research interests are: discourse analysis, contrastive corpus linguistics, discourse markers, disfluency and computer-mediated communication. She is currently a Marie Curie post-doctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She will stay in Saarbrücken for a three-month secondment, during which she will collaborate with Very Demberg on psycholinguistic approaches to discourse relations.
Antrittsvorlesung von Bistra Andreeva: Der Dekan der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität des Saarlandes lädt ein zu der am Montag, 13. Mai 2019, 18 Uhr c.t. im Grossen Sitzungssaal der Philosophischen Fakultät (Campus B3 1, Raum 0.11) stattfindenden Antrittsvorlesung der Privatdozentin für Phonetik und Phonologie Dr. Bistra Andreeva über das Thema "Tonhöhenprofile in slavischen und germanischen Sprachen".
DFG project on pause-internal phonetic particles: The German Research Foundation (DFG) has granted funding for three years for the research project "Pause-internal phonetic particles", directed by Dr. Jürgen Trouvain and Prof. Bernd Möbius. The project will focus on the production and perception of vocalisations such as breath noises and tongue clicks typically found in speech pauses. Research in the project will be based on corpus analyses and production and perception experiments and develop pause models for speech synthesis.

March 2019

ESSV Best Student Paper Award for Eran Raveh: Eran Raveh from the Saarbrücken phonetics group has been awarded the prize of the best student paper at the recent conference on electronical speech signal processing (ESSV) in Dresden, for the paper "Comparing phonetic changes in computer-directed and human-directed speech" by Eran Raveh, Ingmar Steiner, Ingo Siegert, Iona Gessinger and Bernd Möbius. Congratulations!
LSV welcomes doctoral student David Adelani: David Adelani joined the COMPRISE (Cost-effective, Multilingual, Privacy-driven voice-enabled Services) project as a new doctoral student in January. He will work on protecting the privacy of sensitive information (such as credit card number, password and health status) of users from the textual representation of speech data using machine learning methods. Before joining the COMPRISE project, he was a research assistant at MPI-SWS and DFKI, and prior to that he obtained a masters degree in computer science at the African University of Science and Technology (Nigeria).
The SFB welcomes doctoral student Badr Abdullah: Badr Abdullah joined the SFB C4 Project as a new doctoral student in February. He will work on exploring quantitative, speech technology-based methods to measure mutual intelligibility and acoustic-phonetic similarity between closely-related languages, with a focus on the Slavic language family. Before joining the SFB, he received a joint European Master degree in Language and Communication Technologies (LCT) from Saarland University (Germany) and the University of Lorraine (France).

January 2019

A Workshop of Project A3 (SFB 1102) Accepted at EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019: Simon Ostermann and Michael Roth (both SFB 1102, project A3) are organizing an EMNLP workshop called "COIN: COmmonsen INference in NLP", together with Peter Clark (AllenAI), Robyn Speer (Luminoso) and Sheng Zhang (John Hopkins University). The workshop aims at bringing together researchers that are interested in modeling commonsense knowledge, developing computational models thereof, and applying commonsense inference methods in NLP tasks. Together with the workshop, they will organize a shared task on machine comprehension using commonsense knowledge, as follow-up to task 11 at SemEval 2018. In contrast to other machine comprehension tasks (and workshops), the focus will be on inferences over commonsense knowledge about events and participants as required for text understanding.
LCT Annual Meeting 2019: The LCT Annual Meeting for 2019 will take place at Charles University (Czech Republic) on June 20th and 21st, 2019. The meeting will include the graduation ceremony of intake 2016, all graduates and alumni are welcome to attend. More information will be published on the LCT home page at a later time.

December 2018

Welcome Linda and Yoana!: Two new group members joined the SFB1102, Project A5, in December! Linda Sommerfeld has just started her PhD on the role of prediction and surprisal in situated language processing in children. She has a Master degree in Psychology from Saarland University and experience in experimenting with children. Yoana Vergilova has joined the project as a post-doc. Her dissertation is on hemispheric differences in language prediction. In A5, she will continue to investigate ERPs with a news focus on language development.
A Workshop of LSV Accepted at EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019: Members of the LSV group have been successful in getting a workshop accepted at EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019. "Beyond Vision and Language: Integrating Knowledge from the Real World" has one of its main missions to leverage knowledge from an external source that is either provided by an environment or fixed knowledge in an effort to push current boundaries beyond the task-specific integration of language and vision. The workshop is directly related to the B4 project within the Collaborative Research Centre 1102 "Information Density and Linguistic Encoding".
Project COMPRISE Started: December sees the start of the Horizon 2020 project "COMPRISE" with Saarland University's LSV group as one of the principal partners. The project's research will focus is on the development of privacy-respecting dialog systems, addressing users' concerns about their sensitive data being stored on the servers of corporations outside of their control. COMPRISE brings together researchers and industrial partners from four European countries, and is funded by the European Union for three years.

November 2018

Welcome to Anupama Chingacham!: This October, we welcomed Anupama Chingacham, as a doctoral student for the project (SFB 1102) A4. She will be working on adaptable Natural Language Generation systems, such that the system adapts to the perceptual load of the listener. Prior to joining SFB, she received her Masters in Natural Language Processing from University of Lorraine, France.
Welcome to Yu Chen, Anna Konobelkina, and James Whang!: Yu (Tracy) Chen, Anna Konobelkina, and James Whang have joined the LST department and SFB 1102. Tracy is a PhD student in the SFB Project C4, exploring machine translation based similarity measures to explore the intercomprehension between Slavic languages. Anna is a PhD student in the SFB Project C1, focusing on the interaction between information density and the prosodic hierarchy. James is a postdoctoral researcher in project C1, investigating the effects of predictability as defined by Information Theory on phonetic encoding through experiments and modeling.
Welcome, Muqing Li (Lydia)!: Muqing Li (Lydia) has joined Matt Crocker's group as a PhD student on the SFB 1102 project C3. She received her MA degree in Language and Communication from Radboud University, Nijmegen. Her work will focus on rational encoding and decoding of referring expressions.

October 2018

PhD defense Andrea Horbach: Congratulations to Andrea Horbach, who defended her PhD dissertation at Saarland University on October 22, 2018! The title of her thesis is "Analyzing Short-Answer Questions and their Automatic Scoring. Studies on Semantic Relations in Reading Comprehension and the Reduction of Human Annotation Effort".
Application for LST intake open!: Application for LST intake 2019 is now open as well! Application deadline: February 15th, 2019. More information can be found here.
Welcome, Fangzhou Zhai!: Alexander Koller's group welcomes our newest colleague, Fangzhou Zhai (fzhai@coli). Fangzhou will do his PhD in the SFB Project A3, where he will work on adding causal structure to script knowledge that is learned from data. He has a Master of Logic from the University of Amsterdam, and is about to complete his MSc in Computer Science in Saarbrücken.
Application for LCT now open!: Application for LCT intake 2019 is open now! Deadlines: for non-Europeans: 15. February 2019. For Europeans: 15. May 2019. See more information here.

September 2018

Welcome Marjolein van Os!: Marjolein van Os is joining Vera Demberg's group as a doctoral researcher. As part of SFB 1102 (Project A4), her research will treat on the confusability of sounds and words in noisy settings, comparing comprehension in younger vs. older adults.

GSCL thesis award to Annemarie Friedrich

Annemarie Friedrich's PhD dissertation has been selected by the German Society for Computational Linguistics (GSCL) as the best dissertation for the years 2016-2018. The GSCL doctorial thesis award in memory of Wolfgang Hoeppner is granted every two years and marks significant progress to advance language technology and computational linguistics. The thesis, advised by Prof. Manfred Pinkal and titled "States, Events, and Generics: Computational Modeling of Situation Entity Types", will be presented at KONVENS 2018 in Vienna.

August 2018

DFG Emmy Noether award to Michael Roth: The German Research Foundation has accepted Michael Roth to the DFG Emmy Noether Programme, which gives outstanding early career researchers the opportunity to lead an independent junior research group. Michael's research group will use computational methods to investigate linguistic factors behind misunderstandings.

June 2018

Three new LSV publications

Two papers by the LSV group were accepted to this year's "ACL 2018 Workshop on Deep Learning Approaches for Low Resource Natural Language Processing (DeepLo)". Michael Hedderich and Dietrich Klakow present a method to train a neural network in a low-resource setting by using automatically annotated data and handling the noise in the labels. Clayton Greenberg, Mittul Singh and Dietrich Klakow explore the quality of embeddings of rare words, finding that below a certain number of occurrences, SWORDSS (developed at LSV in 2016) can generate better embeddings than standard word2vec.

A paper by Marc Schulder and Michael Wiegand of the LSV group and their colleague Josef Ruppenhofer from the Institute for German Language, Mannheim, was accepted at 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2018). In the paper, the authors present methods for automatically identifying verbs that, like negation, can change the sentiment polarity of a phrase (e.g. "abandon hope" or "alleviate pain"). They expand the previously established mono-lingual methods by introducing cross-lingual methods that use bilingual dictionaries and cross-lingual word embeddings.

May 2018

2nd Phase of SFB 1102 approved: The collaborative research centre 1102 "Information Denstity and Linguistic Encoding", funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), has been granted approx. 11 million euros for a four-year extension starting in July 2018. The CRC directed by Elke Teich brings together around 60 scientists from the fields of Linguistics, Psychology and Computer Science to investigate the hypothesis that language variation and language use can be better understood in terms of a speaker's desire to rationally distribute information across the linguistic signal.

April 2018

Trauer um Lansun Chen

Wir trauern um die vor einigen Tagen verstorbene Lansun Chen, die langjährige Dozentin für Chinesisch an der Universität des Saarlandes. Das Chinesisch-Lektorat war an der ehemaligen Fachrichtung Computerlinguistik und Phonetik angesiedelt. Mit Lansun ist eine sehr sympathische Kollegin und eine ausgezeichnete und begeisterte Lehrerin von uns gegangen.

Two visiting researchers

Sorcha Gilroy (homepage), a PhD student from Edinburgh working on graph parsing and the expressive power of recurrent neural networks, will be visiting Alexander Koller's group between 16.04 and 20.04.

Rik van Noord (homepage), a PhD student from Groningen working on semantic parsing, will be visiting Alexander Koller's group between 23.04 and 27.04.

Please contact Christoph Teichmann if you would like to set an appointment with any of the visitors.

March 2018

Guest talk by Ralph Rose: The next speaker in the Phonetics Colloquium is Ralph Rose (Waseda University) with a talk on: "Towards providing real-time feedback on speech fluency for L2 learner development" (abstract here) on Monday, March 12th, 16:00-17:30 (building C7.2, room 5.09).

February 2018

Five papers accepted at Speech Prosody: A total of 5 papers authored by members of the Phonetics group have been accepted for publication and presentation at the conference on Speech Prosody in Poznań in June 2018. More information can be found on the Phonetics group pages.

January 2018

LCT annual meeting and graduation ceremony: LCT: The annual meeting and graduation ceremony will be held from June 27th to June 29th, 2018, at the University of Lorraine in Nancy, France. All alumni are welcome to attend. More information will be published later on the LCT home page: https://lct-master.org/

December 2017

Best paper award for Julia Dembowski

Julia Dembowski received a best student paper award for her paper "Language Independent Named Entity Recognition using Distant Supervision" [PDF] presented at the 8th Language & Technology Conference, November 17-19 in Poznań, Poland. She did this work as part of her bachelor thesis in the Spoken Language Systems group.

Eight papers accepted at LREC

A total of 8 papers authored by members of the department have been accepted for publication and presentation at LREC in Miyazaki, Japan, in May 2018. More information will be posted shortly on the publication pages of LSV, the Multimodal Speech Processing group, and Manfred Pinkal's research group.

Application for LCT now open!

Application for LCT intake 2018 is open now! The deadline for applications is February 15, 2018.

DFG project on phonetic convergence extended

The German Research Foundation (DFG) has granted a three year extension of their funding for the research project "Phonetic convergence in human-computer interaction (CHIC)", directed by Prof. Bernd Möbius and Dr. Ingmar Steiner.

Phonetic convergence is an increase in similarity of the speech patterns of two interlocutors in communicative interaction. In the first year of funding we have demonstrated that human experimental subjects show patterns of phonetic convergence when being exposed to synthetic voices that are similar to the convergence patterns observed in human-to-human interaction.

In the second funding phase the project will develop a quantitative model of phonetic convergence in spoken HCI, build synthetic voices that are capable of adapting their speech output to the user's speech patterns, and derive implications for the design of conversational interfaces in speech technology. Research in the project will be supported by Iona Gessinger and Eran Raveh.

November 2017

Guest talk by Matthias Scharinger: The next speaker in the Phonetics Colloquium is Matthias Scharinger (University of Marburg) with a talk on: "Processing of speech sounds depends on interactive context effects: Evidence from electrophysiology with omissions" (abstract here) on Wednesday, November 29th, 14:15-15:45 (building C7.2, room 5.09).
BSc-Studentenfragebogen: Liebe Studentinnen und Studenten der FR Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachtechnologie,
wir laden Euch herzlich ein, an einer Online-Befragung hier teilzunehmen. Durch die Teilnahme an der Befragung helft Ihr, die Qualität von Studium und Lehre zu verbessern. Alle Angaben sind freiwillig, die Auswertung der Daten erfolgt selbstverständlich anonym.
Wir wünschen Euch viel Erfolg im Studium. Vielen Dank für Eure Teilnahme!

October 2017

25th anniversary party

The Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics at Saarland University celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. The anniversary party will take place on Saturday, 28 October 2017, in the Aula building of the Saarbrücken campus. Find more details on the webpage for the anniversary: https://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/conf/anniversary/.

Ausstellung Schriftsysteme

Am Donnerstag, 19.10.17, um 18.00 Uhr, wird im Foyer von Gebäude C7.3 die Ausstellung "Schriftsysteme" eröffnet. Die Ausstellung ist aus einem gleichnamigen Seminar entstanden und wird von Anna Welker, Christine Schäfer, Christophe Biwer, Maximilian Wolf, Sascha Keßler und ihrem Dozenten Jürgen Trouvain organisiert. Sie gibt einen kleinen Überblick über die Verschriftungssysteme verschiedener Sprachen: Alphabete konzentrieren sich auf Vokale und Konsonanten, andere Systeme auf Silben, wiederum andere auf Morpheme, aber auch Gebärden und Melodie werden notiert. Weitere Exponate behandeln unter anderem Geheimschriften, Kunstsprachen und technische Aspekte von schriftlicher Sprachkodierung.

Welcome Jonas Groschwitz!

Jonas Groschwitz has joined Alexander Koller's group. He previously worked with Prof. Koller in Potsdam, before spending a year at Macquarie University in Sydney. He will now continue his PhD in Saarbrücken, working on semantic parsing using tree automata and neural networks.

Welcome Michael Hedderich!

Michael Hedderich has joined Dietrich Klakow's Spoken Language Systems group to work on his PhD thesis. His research will concern itself with noisy labels in annotated corpora and how Neural Networks could cope with such noise.

Cluster of Excellence proposal shortlisted

The Saarbrücken initiative for a new Cluster of Excellence "Digital Reality" successfully passed the first round of review. We have been shortlisted and invited to submit a full proposal to the German Science Foundation DFG. The Cluster proposal is coordinated by the Computer Science department, with substantial participation of the Department of Language Science and Technology.

For more information, see the press release by the university:

http://www.uni-saarland.de/nc/aktuelles/artikel/nr/18064.html

Orientation week for students

The Fachschaftsrat Sprachwissenschaft & Sprachtechnologie (fs-sprawitech@coli) is organizing an orientation week for new students, especially Bachelor students. It will take place from 10th to 13th of October. More information can be found here.

September 2017

Prof. Vera Demberg's group at IAA: Prof. Demberg's group will be at the International Motor Show (die Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung) in Frankfurt am Main this month, showcasing research on adaptive dialogue systems and language comprehension supported by SFB 1102.
Visiting researcher Ludivine Crible: Dr. Ludivine Crible (Universite Catholique de Louvain) is visiting Vera Demberg's group from September 25th to October 28th.

August 2017

PhD defense Mittul Singh: Congratulations to Mittul Singh who defended his PhD dissertation at Saarland University on August 31, 2017! The title of his thesis is "Handling long-term dependencies and rare words in low-resource language Modelling". His dissertation was supervised by Prof. Klakow, chair of the Spoken Language Systems group.
DFG project on efficient parsing extended: The German Research Foundation (DFG) has granted a three year extension of their funding for Prof. Alexander Koller's research project "Efficient statistical parsing and translation for expressive grammatical formalisms with tree automata". The first phase of this project investigated algorithms to make a general grammar formalism so efficient that it could be used as a drop in for more specialized implementations. The second phase will focus on reaching state-of-the-art performance in many parsing tasks and on grammar induction. Research in the project will be supported by Jonas Groschwitz and Dr. Christoph Teichmann.
Shared task at SemEval 2018: Manfred Pinkal's group is organizing a shared task at next year's SemEval, officially titled "SemEval 2018 Shared Task 11: Machine Comprehension using Commonsense Knowledge". As in other machine comprehension tasks, reading texts will be provided together with multiple choice questions. Participating systems have to pick the correct answer to each question, given the reading text. In contrast to previous machine comprehension tasks, this task will require a model to make use of commonsense knowledge: some of the questions explicitly require inference over such knowledge and cannot be answered purely from the given text.
SemEval 2018 website
SemDial and SIGdial 2017 at Saarland University: The 21st Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SemDial 2017--SaarDial) and 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGdial 2017) will be held together on August 15-17 at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany.
Mainly organized by Dr. Volha Petukhova from Prof. Klakow's Spoken Language Systems Group (LSV), the two international events will share a special session, demonstration and poster sessions as well as the social events programm. SemDial brings together researchers working on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue in fields such as formal semantics and pragmatics, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. SIGdial provides a regular forum for the presentation of cutting edge research in discourse and dialogue to both academic and industry researchers. Having both of these renowned venues choose Saarbrücken as their 2017 locations firmly demonstrates the international recognition of the quality of Saarland University's Language Science research.
SaarDial
Pressetext

July 2017

PhD defense Ashutosh Modi: Congratulations to Ashutosh Modi, who defended his PhD dissertation at Saarland University on July 7, 2017! The title of his thesis is "Modeling Common Sense Knowledge via Script"
Guest talk by Natalie Lewandowski: The next speaker in the Phonetics Colloquium is Natalie Lewandowski (IMS, University of Stuttgart) with a talk on: "Attention processes in phonetic convergence" (abstract here) on Wednesday, July 12th, 14:15-15:45 (building C7.2, room 5.09).
LSV received German innovation award: The AcListant project by the Spoken Language Systems Group (LSV) received the award "Ausgezeichnete Orte im Land der Ideen" ("Landmarks in the Land of Ideas") by the initiative "Germany - Land of Ideas". As one of 100 recipients of the award, selected from about 1,000 submissions, AcListant is considered a strong example of German innovation and of the award's annual theme "Open your mind and unfold new ideas". The AcListant project, which was developed in cooperation with the German Aerospace Center (DLR), introduces context-aware speech recognition technology into air traffic control, to reduce stress levels and increase efficiency of air traffic controllers.

June 2017

11 papers accepted at Interspeech: A total of 11 papers authored by members of the Phonetics group and the LSV have been accepted for publication and presentation at Interspeech in Stockholm in August 2017. More information can be found on the group pages of LSV and Phonetics.

May 2017

Visiting researcher Denis Paperno: Denis Paperno will visit Coli on May 3rd and give a FEAST talk at 12:00.
Welcome Frances Yung!: Welcome to Frances Yung, who joins Vera Demberg's group as a postdoctoral researcher looking at how pragmatics affects discourse in SFB 1102's project B2 and the MMCI.