New Leibniz ScienceCampus established.

The Institute of Computational Linguistics (ICL) at Heidelberg University and the Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim will jointly establish the Leibniz ScienceCampus "Empirical Linguistics and Computational Language Learning".

The new ScienceCampus aims to conduct innovative research to support high-quality annotation of large-scale corpora of German language through induction of domain-, genre- and variety-adaptive natural language processing models. The models are intended to improve the interpretation of language corpora from different sources and applications, e.g. social media texts, spoken language and specialist or literary texts - and thereby advance empirical research in linguistics as well as innovative applications in the humanities and the social sciences.

Besides linguists from the Institute for the German Language and computational linguists from Heidelberg University, further partners include computer scientists and linguists from the University of Mannheim and Heidelberg University, as well as computational linguists from the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS gGmbH).

The project is funded with 2.6 million Euros for 4 years. The Leibniz Association and Baden-Württemberg's Ministery of Science, Research and the Arts is providing financial support for the project.

More information is found here.

See also the joint press release of Heidelberg University and the Institute for German Language.