The Department of Linguistics (Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft; SfS) was founded in 1985. The
research focus of the SfS is on theoretical and computational linguistics from an interdisciplinary
perspective.
In recent years, research in computational linguistics at the SfS has yielded various high-quality
resources and tools in the field of computational lexicography, machine translation and corpus
linguistics, including the lexical-semantic resource GermaNet, treebanks for German and English, and
annotated corpora.
The SfS has a long track record in external funding and has gained rich experience in various national
and international projects and research programmes. The department has contributed to several
European projects, e.g. COMPASS, TwentyOne, EuroWordNet, and LT4eL ('Language Technology
for eLearning') and national projects, e.g. Verbmobil and Lexical Semantic Disambiguation (SLD) and
Semantic Information Retrieval (SIR).
The SfS has accumulated a wealth of relevant experience in the field of e-Learning. It has developed
teaching material and implemented virtual courses for computational linguists in a project funded by
the government of Baden-Württemberg, called VirtuGrade, and in a project funded by the German
Federal Ministry of Education and Research, “Medien-intensive Lehrmodule in der
Computerlinguistik-Ausbildung” (MiLCA), for which it acted as the national co-ordinatory site. We
have been a partner in the EU-IST project LT4eL since 2005, in which we are currently Work package
Leaders responsible for the development of information extraction tools and their integration into a
learning management system.
During the course of LT4eL, corpora were compiled and information extraction tools were developed
which will be available to the LTfLL consortium. A key contribution of the SfS will be to apply
language technology methods to positioning learners with regard to their prior/current knowledge and
its subsequent conceptual development. The SfS will be Work package Leader of WP4 “Positioning
the learner”. The SfS will compare knowledge-rich and knowledge poor approaches, as applied to a
number of languages. It will contribute to the conception of usage scenarios and to the validation of
tools and services.