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Congratulations
to our student Yannic Bracke, who received the GSCL prize for the best Computational Linguistics BSc thesis (in German-speaking countries) in 2020/21. The thesis is called "Automatic text classification with imbalanced data" and was supervised by Prof. Manfred Stede.

New publications in relation to the LOLA group

New Conference presentations in relation to the LOLA group

  • Abakarova, D., & Noiray, A. (2021). Children’s coarticulatory patterns reflect undifferentiated articulatory strategies. Proceedings BUCLD, virtual meeting.
  • Popescu, A., & Noiray, A. (2021). Does learning to read interact with speech patterns in consistent alphabetic systems? The case of German. AMLaP 2021, Paris.

SAIAL 2021 - 15-16 April 2021
Virtual conference on Structural Asymmetries in African Languages - organized at the University of Potsdam by Doreen Georgi (University Potsdam), Katharina Hartmann (Goethe University Frankfurt) & Malte Zimmermann (University of Potsdam).
The workshop will be held as a virtual conference via Zoom. Please contact Timea Sarvas to receive access.

BMBF-funded project
In February 2021, a new BMBF-funded project aims at building an adaptive learning assistant for school children. It is coordinated by Manfred Stede (Applied Computational Linguistics), and partners are Prof. Böhme (Inklusionspädagogik, UP), Prof. Stober (Artificial Intelligence, Univ. Magdeburg) and Solocode GmbH (Berlin). 

ISSP 2020
At the International Seminar on Speech production, Elina Rubertus and Dzhuma Abakarova both carrying out their PhD at the Laboratory for Oral Language Acquisition (LOLA) were awarded 2 students presentation awards.

ttps://issp2020.yale.edu

* Dzhuma Abakarova: Articulatory Strategies and Coarticulatory Patterns Across Age
* Elina Rubertus: Anticipatory and Carryover Coarticulation Share a Smilar Origin: Evidence from Child Speech

 

Linguistics Camp Michendorf 17.–19.09.2020
Website: https://68.stuts.de/en/lingmeetup/
Registration: Monday, August 17th- Sunday, September 12th. You can register for the Meetup via our registration form here.

New international MSc Linguistics comes into effect - WiSe 2020/21
The new English MSc "Linguistics: Empirical and Theoretical
Foundations" is coming into effect with the WiSe 2020/21.
Application is possible as of April 1st 2020. The MSc program is currently translated into the online system, which may delay the application date . Please contact Prof. Doreen Georgi for further information on the application procedure: doreen.georgi@uni-potsdam.de
https://www.uni-potsdam.de/en/studium/what-to-study/master/masters-courses-from-a-to-z/linguistics-master

New publication from the Laboratory for Oral Language Acquisition (LOLA) in Frontiers Psychology, section Language Sciences:
Spoken Language Development and the Challenge of Skill Integration
Aude Noiray, Anisia Popescu, Helene Killmer, Elina Rubertus, Stella Krüger & Lisa Hintermeier
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02777/full


Neue Publikationen aus dem Bereich Aphasie

  1. Stadie, N., Hanne, S. & Lorenz, A. (2019). Lexikalische und semantische Störungen bei Aphasie. Stuttgart: Thieme Verlag.
  2. Adelt, A., Burchert, F., Adani, F. & Stadie, N. (2019): What matters in processing German object relative clauses in aphasia - timing or morpho-syntactic cues? Aphasiology, DOI: 10.1080/02687038.2019.1645290

New publication in Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research:
Noiray, A., Wieling, M., Abakarova, D., Rubertus, E., & Tiede, M. (2019). Back from the future: Nonlinear anticipation in adults’ and children’s speech. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 62(8S), 3033–3054. https://doi.org/10.1044/2019_JSLHR-S-CSMC7-18-0208

International conference Phonetics and Phonology in Europe (PaPE), 17.06.19 - 20.06.19
Three contributions from the Laboratory for Oral Language Acquisition (LOLA) for the 2019 edition of the international PaPE conference, held in Lecce (Italy)

  1. Krüger, S. & Noiray, A. (2019). How much in advance can listeners perceive upcoming speech targets? Insights from children and adults.
  2. Popescu, A., Hintermeier, L., Krüger, S. & Noiray, A. (2019). Does the acquisition of reading affect speech production? 
  3. Sander, J., Höhle, B., & Noiray, A. (2019). From the eye to the mouth: does a developmental shift in attention co-emerge with the emergence of babbling?

International conference BUCLD 44 (Boston University Conference on Language Development), 7-10.11:
Popescu, A., Noiray, A. (2019). Reading proficiency and phonemic awareness as predictors of coarticulatory gradients in children.

International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian (June 11-12, 2019)
We are pleased to announce that ICSH14 will be held at the University of Potsdam. The ICSH is a meeting organized biannually for linguists working on or having an interest in any linguistically relevant aspect of the Hungarian language. For the call (deadline: Jan 15th) and further information, please visit this website: https://icsh14.wordpress.com/.

Workshop Dynamical Systems Theory for the Phonetic Sciences
November 14-15.16, Campus Golm.
Organizer: Aude Noiray (LOLA) in collab. with SFB 1247
Guest speaker: Pr. Khalil Iskarous (University of Southern California, USA)
Abstract: Dynamical systems theory is the theoretical backbone of the phonetic sciences, and it is essential for understanding the movement of the air in acoustic and aerodynamic modes, the movement of the vocal tract structures, and the control of the phonological process that organizes speech. This tutorial starts by introducing the student to the basic vocabulary of dynamics, mostly using arithmetic, then develops some basic programming skills to allow the student to simulate dynamical systems essential for understanding speech. The areas to be covered will include vowel acoustics, fricative acoustics and aerodynamics, task dynamics, oscillator theory of syllable structure, and stochastic theories of speech variability. Registration required. More details here.

Workshop of the MSc CogSys project class "Automatic Text Simplification" (M. Stede / S. Stober)
Monday Oct 29, 2018 / Room 14.0.45 Campus Golm

10.15 Dr. Sanja Stajner (Univ Mannheim): Text simplification using "traditional" and/or neural methods 11.00 Dr. Zarah Weiss (Univ Tübingen): KANSAS - Text simplification and reading disabilities
11.45 Edit Szügyi/Sören Etler (T4): Automatic proficiency assessment of German learners' texts
12.05 Valentina Aivazian (T2): Rule-based syntactic simplification for German
12.25 Rebekah Cramerus (D1a): Learning a Loss Function for Text Simplification
12.45 Maximilian Seidler (D1b): Deep Text Evaluation
Lunch break
14.00 Ali Hinnawe, Geethu Babu (T1): Corpus-based lexical simplification for English
14.20 Simon Untergasser (D2): Coupling a Bi-CNN Encoder and a CNN decoder to automatically simplify English Sentences
14.40 Kuan Yu (D3): Sentence simplification with character-level transformer
15.00 Martin Klotz (D4): Explicit and Implicit Constraining of the Latent Space in Encoder-Decoder Models for Text Complexity Transfer

Investigating the effect of alcohol on L1/L2 speech
Dr. Aude Noiray has been invited by Pr. Martijn Wieling (Groningen University, https://www.rug.nl/staff/m.b.wieling/ )to investigate the effect of alcohol on speaking and perceiving a second language at Lowlands Sciences (Lowlands festival, Netherlands). For three days, together with a team of 10 students, Pr Wieling and Dr.  Noiray recorded 150 participants using ultrasound imaging and tested L1/L2 perception in 300 participants. A short video summary of the study and interview of Pr. Wieling is available here: https://youtu.be/Qz0CsZw4Ck8

New insights on adult´s speech production organization and its changes through development 
Results from various articulatory investigations of German speaking adults and children have been recently published by Dr. Aude Noiray and her group at Laboratory for Oral Language Acquisition (LOLA: https://www.uni-potsdam.de/en/lola/index.html): 
(1) Noiray, A., Abakarova, D., Rubertus, E., Krüger, S., & Tiede, M (2018). How children organise their speech in the first years of life? Insight from ultrasound imaging. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, (61), 1355-1368. DOI:10.1044/2018_JSLHR-S-17-0148.

(2) Rubertus, E., & Noiray, A. (2018). On the development of gestural organization: A cross-sectional study of vowel-to-vowel anticipatory coarticulation. 13(9): e0203562. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0203562

(3) Abakarova, D., Noiray, A, & Iskarous, K. (2018). Quantifying lingual coarticulation in German using Mutual Information: an ultrasound study. Journal of Acoustical Society of America, 897-907. DOI: 10.1121/1.5047669.

44. GGS-Tagung, 4.-5.10.2018
vom 4.-5.10.2018 wird an der UP die 44. GGS-Tagung stattfinden. Wir laden Sie herzlich ein, einen Vortrag (25 + 10 Minuten) auf der Tagung zu halten. Schicken Sie uns dafür bitte Ihren Namen, Ihre Affiliation, den Titel des Vortrages und den vertretenen linguistischen Teilbereich (Morphologie, Syntax, Semantik, siehe Anmerkung unten) anggs2018uni-potsdamde.
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/ggs2018/

Faculty International Day, 04.07.2018, Campus Golm
Students as well as Exchange Coordinators from our faculty and colleagues from the International Office and Careers Service are organising a programme of events and will be available to answer your questions.
Wann: 14:30-17:30 Uhr
Wo: Campus Golm, Haus 14, Raum 0.47

UPers at LabPhon Lisbon 2018
UPers contributions consist in 2 talks, 4 posters, and a workshop organization (the latter in collab with a UP international partner, Haskins Labs)

1. "Categorical perception of lexical stress by simultaneous and late bilinguals" by Natalie Boll-Avetisyan, Sandrien van Ommen, Thierry Nazzi and Barbara Höhle (Talk)
2. "Infants asymmetrical vowel perception is affected by their experience to the native language" by Antonia Götz, Anna Krasotkina, Gudrun Schwarzer and Barbara Höhle (Poster)
3. "The beneficial role of variability for acquiring novel words: A habituation study with 14-month-old German-learning children" by Tom Fritzsche, Adamantios Gafos and Barbara Höhle (Poster)
4.  "VOT accommodation in a cue-distractor paradigm" by Stephen Tobin and Adamantios Gafos (Poster)
5. "On the speed-accuracy trade-off and speed-curvature power law of tongue movements in repetitive speech” by Stephan Kuberski and Adamantios Gafos (Talk)
6. "Temporal stability patterns of stop-liquid and stop-rhotic clusters in Spanish" by Stavroula Sotiropoulou, Mark Gibson, Stephen Tobin and Adamantios Gafos (Poster)
7. "Tutorial on Ultrasound Evidence in Phonology" organized by D. H. Whalen, Aude Noiray and Steven M. Lulich (Workshop)

TaCoS in Potsdam, June 08-10, 2018
The TaCoS is the Conference for Students of Computational Linguistics, this time organized by students of the B.Sc. Computerlinguistik and M.Sc. Cognitive Systems, here in Potsdam! All students of computational linguistics and related fields are invited for presentations, talks and workshops on current topics or may even present their own topic, may it be their final thesis or a hobby project. Furthermore, the TaCoS is an occasion to connect to other students and universities from all over Germany. For more information and registration see our website: tacos28.de

Conference "Crossing the Borders"
We are pleased to announce the Crossing the borders conference held at the University of Potsdam for the very first time. The topic for this 3-day conference is the interplay of language, cognition, and the brain in early human development. We aim to bring together researchers from psychology, linguistics, and developmental neuroscience. The program will include keynote talks, oral presentations and poster sessions, and a science slam, providing early-career researchers in the field of infant and child development with ample opportunities to present their work.
Information on the website:https://crossing-project.de/ctb-conference-2018/. There are no registration fees. Call Deadline: 30-Apr-2018

Summer school "Limits of Variability in Language", June 18-22, 2018
The summer school will bring together leading international experts from different subfields of linguistics, covering the span from modern sociolinguistics, via dialect research, to grammar theory and the formal study of African languages. The school’s central topic is the empirical study and theoretical modelling of variability and its constraints at various levels of language.
https://www.uni-potsdam.de/de/sfb1287/summer-school-limits-of-variability.html

New DFG grant funded
Congratulation to Aude Noiray on a new DFG grant "Understanding spoken language organization in the first decade of life" http://www.uni-potsdam.de/en/lola/research-projects.html

Erasmus+ applications for 2018/19
Erasmus+ applications for 2018-19 are now open. Applications should be sent to the Dept's Erasmus+ Coordinator (Daniel Williams) by eof Jan 2018. PhD students may also apply.  Our Erasmus+ partner universities for (comp) ling are Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris III, Aristotle U of Thessaloniki, U of Patras, U of Ulster, U of Trento, U of Lund, U Zürich, U de Navarra and U of Oslo.

Beste BSc-Abschlussarbeit
Die BSc-Arbeit unserer Computerlinguistik-Studentin Katarina Krüger wurde mit dem Preis der Gesellschaft für Sprachtechnologie und Computerlinguistik für die beste BSc-Abschlussarbeit 2016/2017 zur Computerlinguistik im deutschsprachigen Raum ausgezeichnet. Wir gratulieren!

Publication - Tatjana Scheffler: Conversations on Twitter
D. Fišer/M. Beißwenger (2017), Investigating Computer-Mediated Communication: Corpus-Based Approaches To Language In The Digital World, Ljubljana: University Press. ISBN 978-961-237-950-6.

DGfS 2018
Auf dem DGfS 2018 in Stuttgart ist Tatjana Scheffler Ko-Leiterin der Arbeitsgruppe zum Thema "Why Indeed? Questions at the Interface of Theoretical and Computational Linguistics”.

TripleA 5 in Konstanz, June 27-29, 2018
Triple A, a workshop series for semantic fieldworkers founded in 2013 by researchers from Tübingen and Potsdam, will take place in Konstanz next year. The deadline for abstract submissions is February 2, 2018. You can find more information here: https://semanticsofaaa.wordpress.com

E-Learning UP Award 2017
Sebastian Stober received the E-Learning UP Award 2017 for his lecture "Representation Learning - From a Deep Learning Perspective." The award is intended to acknowledge and highlight the efforts and achievements of lecturers who successfully used the possibilities of the digital media in an exemplary way to facilitate learning.

3rd Summer School ISOLDE
ISOLDE will take place from 11 to 15 of June 2018 in Potsdam/Germany.
This summer school is specifically organised to bring together Pre- and Post-docs working on infant language acquisition in Europe. The registration is now open:
www.uni-potsdam.de/en/isolde/<wbr />registration

Project UPracticeML started on November 1, 2017
The new project UPracticeML - a cooperation between the Machine Learning Junior Research Group (Dr. Stober) and the Applied Computational Linguistics Discourse Research Lab (Prof. Manfred Stede) with a duration of 2 years - has started. The project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and aims to extend the machine learning curriculum in the Cognitive Systems Master at the University of Potsdam.

Probanden mit Aphasie gesucht!
Für Untersuchungen und Studien im Fachbereich Patholinguistik/ Kognitive Neurolinguistik können sich Personen mit einer Sprach-, Sprech- oder Schluckstörung als ProbandIn anmelden. Weitere Informationen finden Sie im Flyer.

Ausgezeichnete Poster
Beim 11. Herbsttreffen Patholinguistik wurden zwei Poster von Studentinnen des Studiengangs Patholinguistik ausgezeichnet. Der 1. Preis ging an Ragna Krug, Hanna Stübner, Sophie Hoffmann, Judith Heide und Maria Blickensdorff, die eine Therapie aus dem internen Praktikum präsentierten („Die Behandlung dysprosodischer Symptome bei Sprechapraxie – Eine Einzelfallstudie“). Den 2. Preis erhielten Lisa Welke und Ulrike Frank für das Poster „Pilotfragebogenstudie zur praktischen Umsetzung und Koordination des Trachealkanülen-Managements in Berlin und Brandenburg“. Herzlichen Glückwunsch!

Labphon 16, 2018
Together with Doug. H Whalen (CUNY, Haskins Laboratories) and Steven Lulich (Indiana University), Aude Noiray will organise a satellite event around Labphon 16, June 19. http://labphon16.labphon.org/index.html. This year the focus is: "Variation, development and impairment: Between phonetics and phonology.

Labphon 16, 2018 - Satellite event: Ultrasound evidence in Phonology
We are delighted our application for a satellite event : Ultrasound evidence in Phonology has been accepted. In this satellite, Aude Noiray will give a workshop on ultrasound in (a)typical language acquisition. In this workshop, she will present data from DFG and Marie curie funded projects,e.g., from the PredictAble project (Coordinator: Prof. Hoehle, https://predictable.eu).

Short-term fellows SFB 1287
The short-term fellows sponsored by our newly established SFB 1287 have now been selected. Nantke Pecht, Jenny Yu, Lara Schwarz, and Xiayimaierdan Abudushalamu will be joining the teams of A01, B01, B04, and C03. We look forward to hosting these students in our Department in 2018.