Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS): News

June 2012

The German Research Council DFG has released an updated version of its survey of research funding. The University of Stuttgart CS department (which IfNLP is part of) was the number one recipient of DFG funding for computer science in Germany for the period 2008-2010, receiving a total of EUR 11.8 million.

May 2012

Our new building, the Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI), was officially dedicated today. As we have already experienced since we moved in two months ago, the spatial layout of the building and its proximity to the main CS building are of great benefit for collaborations within the institute as well as with the CS department as a whole.

April 2012

Wiltrud Kessler and Fabienne Cap organized IfNLP's successful participation in the university's Girl's Day on April 26. A group of 9 girls spent a fun morning at the institute learning and experimenting with machine translation between English and German. We'll be offering the workshop on a regular basis for girls who are interested in languages and computers.

March 2012

A proposal co-authored by Dr. Alexander Fraser, the head of statistical machine translation at IfNLP, has been selected for the prestigious Johns Hopkins University CLSP summer workshop. The topic is "Domain Adaptation in Statistical Machine Translation" and the workshop will be held from June 25 until August 3 at Johns Hopkins.

January 2012

Google Inc has granted another Google Award to IfNLP. This is the second award for the Piggyback project that was started in 2009 in collaboration with Massi Ciaramita at Google's Zurich research lab.

November 2011

We are happy to report that Dr. Lonneke van der Plas has accepted the position of Junior Professor for Computational Linguistics at IfNLP. Dr. van der Plas completed her PhD research on lexical acquisition for question answering at the University of Groningen in 2008 and has also worked on semantic role labeling for dialog systems. She will join us in early spring of next year.

August 2011

The start of the BMBF project CLARIN-D was officially announced end of July. CLARIN-D will develop a digital infrastructure for language-centered research in the social sciences and humanities and make it available in the form of data resources and interoperable and scalable tools at a number of service centers. IfNLP is one of 9 partners in this project (project coordinator: Prof. Hinrichs, Tübingen). Total funding for the first 3 years is 8.5 million euros.

July 2011

Prof. Hinrich Schuetze has been appointed General Chair of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2013. Time and place of the meeting will be announced soon.

May 2011

The University of Stuttgart has approved our application to start our Master of Computational Linguistics program in October of 2011. If you read this and you are interested in doing a Master at our institute, please send your application to admission-cl-msc@ims.uni-stuttgart.de!

March 2011

ACL has released the list of long papers to be presented at this year's conference. Seven of the first authors of accepted papers are from IfNLP. If we counted right, then this makes IfNLP as successful this year as Massachusetts Institute of Technology and UC Berkeley. First place goes to CMU with nine papers.

February 2011

IfNLP researcher Sabine Schulte im Walde has been awarded a prestigious DFG Heisenberg fellowship. The Heisenberg Program is intended for outstanding and highly qualified researchers to make sure they continue their careers in science and research. Sabine was also awarded funding for a postdoc and a doctoral student. Her research will focus on distributional approaches to semantic relatedness.

January 2011

The official website of LabPhon 13, the 13th Conference on Laboratory Phonology, has been launched here. LabPhon is the premier international meeting in the area of quantitative and laboratory methods in phonology and held every two years. IfNLP will be organizer and host of the 2012 meeting.

December 2010

Our faculty, Faculty 5 CS&EE, established a committee for granting Dr. phil. degrees this month. We now have the ability to grant both Dr. phil. and Dr. rer. nat. degrees, depending on whether the focus of a dissertation is in computational linguistics or CS-oriented natural language processing. This makes IfNLP the only institute in Germany in our research area that offers both Dr. phil. and Dr. rer. nat. degrees as part of its regular doctoral degree programs.

November 2010

Dr. Andreas Maletti, a leading researcher in the area of tree automata and the recipient of a prestigious Emmy Noether fellowship, has selected IfNLP as the hosting institution for his research group. Emmy Noether fellows are free to choose any university in Germany. We are very excited that Andreas has selected Stuttgart as the best environment for conducting his research.

October 2010

The graduate college of SFB 732 officially started this month. The first six graduate students received one-year fellowships to study with faculty members who are part of the SFB. A program of classes and events is offered to the six new students and the 20+ graduate students that work for individual SFB projects.

September 2010

We hosted the IVA4NLP workshop on September 17. About 40 researchers met in Vaihingen to discuss prospects and challenges of using interactive visual analysis for natural language processing, computational linguistics and information retrieval. The event was part of the DFG SPP (Schwerpunktprogramm) 1335 Scalable Visual Analysis.

July 2010

The groundbreaking ceremony for our new building took place on July 16th. We are looking forward to moving into a brandnew building on the main campus (probably end of 2011) and would like to thank the University of Stuttgart and state and federal governments for financing this project.

June 2010

Congratulations to Florian Laws for being awarded a Google European Doctoral Fellowship!! And thanks very much to Google for this generous program in support of academic research.

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