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

First LangSci talk of the year: Sabine Schulte im Walde will talk on January 16th 2020 about Distributional and Multi-Modal Models for Compositionality and Figurative Language: German Noun Compounds and Particle Verbs

The paper „Event-related potentials index lexical retrieval (N400) and integration (P600) during language comprehension“ by Francesca Delogu, Harm Brouwer and Matthew Crocker from project A1 is among the most downloaded Brain and Cognition articles.

You can find the article here.

On November 6, Alexander Koller, PI of SFB projects A3 and A7, gave a talk at Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.
Alexander’s talk „Hey, Siri! Ok, Google! – Wie Maschinen lernen, Sprache zu verstehen“ was part of the DFG lecture series „Exkurs – Einblick in die Welt der Wissenschaft“ which aims at providing the public with insight into DFG funded research projects. Details on the talk can be found on the DFG website. An audio recording is also available on the DFG YouTube channel.

Tutorial on Practical Statistics for Research in Machine Translation and Translation Studies
Antonio Toral (University of Groningen)

The tutorial will introduce a set of very useful statistical tests for conducting analyses in the research areas of Machine Translation (MT) and Translation Studies (TS).

For each statistical test, the presenter will:
1. introduce it in the context of a common research example that pertains to the area of MT and/or TS
2. explain the technique behind the test and its assumptions
3. cover common pitfalls when the test is applied in research studies, and
4. conduct a hands-on activity so that attendees can put the knowledge acquired in practice straight-away. All examples and exercises will be in R.

The following statistical tests will be covered:
– t-tests (both parametric and non-parametric)
– bootstrap resampling
– Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients
– linear mixed-effects models.

This tutorial is relevant for researchers and students who would like to get a hands on approach, but is also open for those who would like to get a general idea on the topic.
It will take place on Wednesday, November 20, in the conference room of building C7.4 from 9:15 to 17:30.
A few places are still available! If you would like to participate, please send an email to sfb1102@uni-saarland.de by Tuesday, November 19, noon.

The Conference on Rational Approaches on Language Science (RAILS), organized by members of the SFB 1102, will take place from 24th to 26th October 2019.

Please find the full program here.

Aditya Mogadala (Project B4) is the initiator and organizer of the workshop „Beyond Vision and LANguage: inTEgrating Real-World kNowledge“!
For more information, please check here.