Abstract

We introduce IDeaL (Information Density and Linguistic Encoding), a collaborative research center that investigates the hypothesis that language use may be driven by the optimal use of the communication channel. From the point of view of linguistics, our approach promises to shed light on selected aspects of language variation that are hitherto not sufficiently explained. Applications of our research can be envisaged in various areas of natural language processing and AI, including machine translation, text generation, speech synthesis and multimodal interfaces.

The full article can be found here.

The German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved the Research Project B6 – Aspects of Information Density in Human and Machine Translation as of August 1st 2015. The Project will be coordinated by Prof. Josef van Genabith.

More details coming soon.

On Monday, Saarland University opened its new Graduate Centre as a building in which young scientists will be able to work and organise meetings or small conferences. The opening ceremony for the Graduate Centre, which brought together researchers from all disciplines under the heading „Science and Humanities in the Digital World„,  included a talk by SFB speaker Elke Teich entitled „Language – Text – Information„.

For further information on the new Graduate Centre, please click here.

In an interview with radio station SR 2 aired on April 16, Elke Teich gave an overview of the research conducted in the SFB 1102.

AcademiaNet is an international expert database for outstanding female academics run by Robert Bosch Stiftung. It was launched by Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel in 2010 to gather the profiles of the most highly qualified women in their fields. Membership is by invitation only.

http://www.academia-net.org/

The workshop Identification and Annotation of Discourse Relations in Spoken Language (DiSpoL 2015) is part of the COST Action TextLink „Structuring Discourse in Multilingual Europe“.

The overall goal of the workshop is the development of a unified annotation framework for discourse-relational devices (DRDs) that is applicable to different languages and text types, including spoken and written dimensions.

For more information, please click here.

PROGRAM

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At this workshop, we aim to bring together people from data mining, language modeling, linguistics and digital humanities to further enhance collaborations between these fields.

PROGRAM

09:00-09:20    Elke Teich and Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Welcome and Introduction (presentation slides)
09:20-10:00    Jon Dehdari, An Overview of Language Modeling and its Applications (presentation slides)
10:00-10:40    Dietrich Klakow, Practical applications for language models (mehr …)