We’re thrilled to announce that two members of Project C3 were awarded their PhD theses in July!

Elli Tourtouri defended her thesis “Rational Redundancy in Situated Communication” on July 2nd, and has now taken up a post-doc at the MPI in Nijmegen.

Torsten Jachmann defended his thesis “The Immediate Influence of Speaker Gaze on Situated Speech Comprehension: Evidence from Multiple ERP Components” on June 24th, and will be staying on as a post-doc in Matt Crocker’s group.

Congratulations to them both!

At the 15th annual meeting of Slavic Linguistics Society, a presentation on ‚Phonetic distance in cross-lingual priming: Evidence from Bulgarian, Czech, Polish and Russian‘ is held by Jacek Kudera and Philip Georgis (Project C4).

Check out the new article by Vera Demberg and Tim Schröder on smart voice assistants published in the latest issue of DFG magazine „forschung“.

Read the full article here.

A joint paper by members of Projects B6 and B7 has been accepted for publication and will be presented at the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation @ACL 2020!

Bizzoni, Yuri; Juzek, Tom S; España-Bonet, Cristina; Chowdhury, Koel Dutta; van Genabith, Josef; Teich, Elke
How Human is Machine Translationese? Comparing Human and Machine Translations of Text and Speech
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation ACL (IWSLT 2020)

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.