Conference on Rational Approaches in Language Science (RAILS)
13-15 February 2025, Saarbruecken, Germany

We are delighted to announce the upcoming 2nd edition of the conference on „Rational Approaches in Language Science“ (RAILS), which will be organized by the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1102 „Information Density and Linguistic Encoding“. The central theme of this conference is (bounded) rational communication, i.e. the idea that language users continuously strive to optimize their means of communication to effectively convey their intended messages. Thus, rational communication has consequences on how recipients encode and remember information, and it also impacts language variation and change.

More information can be found here.

In our next LangSci talk, Svetlana Vetchinnikova, University Researcher, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies at University of Helsinki, will give a talk on „Individual variation in perceptual and usage-based chunking„.

The hybrid talk will take place in building A 2.2, room 2.02. and on MS Teams June 13th at 16:15!

The programme for the Multilingual Modelling Workshop has been published. The workshop will take place on 7 June 2024, from 9.30 to 15.30 (room 1.20.1, building A 2.2).

In our next LangSci talk, Shubhra Kanti Karmaker, Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Auburn University, Alabama, will give a talk on „Democratizing AI through Controlled Narrative Generation and Knowledge Grounding„.

The hybrid talk will take place in building A 2.2, room 2.02. and on MS Teams June 6th at 16:15!

We are excited to announce the next edition of our interdisciplinary Science Slam with contributions from PhD students, Postdocs and PIs of the SFB 1102, the RTG „Neuroexplicit Models of Language, Vision, and Action“ and the Interdisciplinary Institute for Societal Computing. The event will take place on Tuesday, April 30th at 4.30 pm in building C7.4. Please find the program here.

In our next LangSci talk, Prof. dr. Niels Taatgen, Director of the Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen, will give a talk on „Cognitive skills: the building blocks of human intelligence„.

The talk will take place as a hybrid event in building A 2.2, room 2.02 and on MS Teams on April 24th at 10:00!

The day after, Byung-Doh Oh, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics at The Ohio State University, will give a talk on „The bigger-is-worse effects of model size and training data of large language model surprisal on human reading times„.

The talk will take place as a hybrid event in building A 2.2, room 1.20.2 and on MS Teams on April 25th at 16:15!

Project B3 „Information Density and Ellipsis Redundancy” is pleased to invite applications for a postdoctoral position. Details on the vacant position can be found here!

In our first LangSci talk of the semester, Steffen Eger, Heisenberg Group Leader of the Natural Language Learning Group (NLLG) at University of Mannheim, will give a talk on „Syntactic language change in English and German„.

The hybrid talk will take place in building A 2.2, room 2.02. and on MS Teams April 18th at 16:15!

We are very proud and happy to announce that a member of Project C4 was awarded his PhD degree!

Badr M. Abdullah defended his thesis „The Representation of Speech Variability and Variation in Deep Neural Networks“ on 1st March 2024.

Many congratulations to Badr!

In our next LangSci talk, Michael Franke, professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Tübingen, will give a talk on „Cognitive & Language Sciences in the age of Large Language Models„.

The hybrid talk will take place on Tuesday 19th in building A 2.2, room 2.02. and on MS Teams at 10:00!