Two papers by members of Project C4 have been accepted for publication and will be available soon:

„Visual vs. auditory perception of Bulgarian stimuli by Russian native speakers“ (26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies Dialogue 2020) by Irina Stenger and Tania Avgustinova

„The INCOMSLAV Platform: Experimental Website with Integrated Methods for Measuring Linguistic Distances and Asymmetries in Receptive Multilingualism“ (Citizen Linguistics in Language Resource Development Workshop (CLLRD 2020) at the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2020)) by Irina Stenger, Klára Jágrová and Tania Avgustinova

Hugging Face – whose mission is to advance and democratize NLP for everyone will be sponsoring the Best Paper awards in the LANTERN Workshop collocated with COLING 2020. More information on the workshop organised by Aditya Mogadala (Project B4) coming soon.

About 2000 respondents have already taken part in our web-based intercomprehension experiments (http://intercomprehension.coli.uni-saarland.de/en/). Thank you all for participating and/or forwarding the link to as many people as possible!
We still need many, many participants from various (Slavic) language backgrounds. Furthermore, we have NEW audio experiments with Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, and Russian stimuli!

Submission is now open for a new topic in Frontiers – Rational Approaches in Language Science – with topic editors Matthew Crocker, Gerhard Jäger, Gina Kuperberg, Hannah Rohde, Elke Teich and Rory Turnbull.

We invite manuscripts on rational explanations of

• Language use: behavioural or neurophysiological evidence — whether production or comprehension — for rational processes of speech and language production and perception, as exemplified by expectation-based theories, Bayesian, and noisy-channel models of communication;
• Language development: evidence for rational strategies in the acquisition of all levels of linguistic structure, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics;
• Language change and language evolution: Corpus-based, typological, or simulation-based evidence regarding the emergent structure of human languages;
• Situated language use: the influence of visual context and communicative goals. Examples include evidence for expectation-based mechanisms, pragmatic inference, as well as rational encoding strategies.

Keywords: rationality, information theory, bayesian modeling, surprisal theory, entropy, language evolution, psycholinguistics, language change, language production, language development

Find more information here.

In linguistics we often need to reconcile diverse kinds of language data comprising annotation on different linguistic levels. A tool to search and visualize such data is ANNIS, „a web browser-based search and visualization architecture for complex multilayer linguistic corpora with diverse types of annotation“. To gain an insight into the complex architecture of ANNIS we will offer a one-day workshop.

The workshop will start with a general introduction to the public ANNIS installation explaining the surface, different possible types of annotations and ways of querying different corpora. In a second block we will also get familiar with the local ANNIS version (ANNIS kickstarter) and the pepper framework in order to use ANNIS on our own laptops and how to import our own corpora into ANNIS. In hands-on exercises there will be time to practice the query language on your own data.

Some places are still available! If you would like to register, please get in touch with Pauline Krielke: mariepauline.krielke@uni-saarland.de

Time: Postponed until further notice
Place: UdS Campus, Building A2.2, Konferenzsaal

The 3rd SFB networking workshop (Cologne – Potsdam – Saarbrücken) on the Relation of Prominence, Surprisal and Information Structure will take place in Saarbrücken. This series of network meetings brings together researchers from the CRCs in Cologne, Potsdam and Saarbrücken. The aim is to discuss shared themes and methodological approaches of the CRC 1252 „Prominence in Language“, CRC 1287 „Limits of Variability in Language“, and CRC 1102 „Information Density and Linguistic Encoding“. The workshop has to be postponed due to the corona crisis. More information coming as soon as possible.

Noah Goodman from Stanford University will close this semester’s LangSci series with a talk about „Inference and information: the computational basis of referential language use“. The talk will take place in the conference room of building C7.4 at 4:15 pm. Please click here for more details.

The next PhD Day of SFB 1102 will take place February 10th in Building C7.4 (Conference Room) at Saarland University. Please click here for the program.

Check out an interview with SFB speaker Elke Teich at the 2019 CLARIN Annual Conference in Leipzig where she gave a keynote talk on „Corpus-Driven Investigation of Language Use, Variation and Change – Resources, Models, Tools“.
In the interview Elke Teich discusses the mechanisms of language variation and the value of integrating exploratory, data-driven methods with linguistic micro-analysis. The interview is available on Youtube.

Workshop: Reviewing (Feb 13, in English)

In this workshop, we will look at the question of what makes good and bad reviewing. Reviewing is an essential part of an academic’s life, just like teaching and writing papers, and yet, it is rarely approached systematically. This workshop will do exactly that.

We will look at existing reviewing guidelines and possible shortcomings thereof. Then, in groups, the participants are encouraged to discuss examples and exchange their own experiences. Prof Bernd Möbius will present the view of publishers and editors and in a panel discussion, Prof Dietrich Klakow, Prof Bernd Möbius, and Prof Annemarie Verkerk will discuss „hot topics“ and questions from the participants.

The workshop will be in English and will take place on February 13, 2020, 13h-16h in building A2.2 (Konferenzsaal). For further details, including a full schedule, go here. To register, please drop a message to the SFB coordination at sfb1102@uni-saarland.de