The “Foundations of Computational Linguistics” Lab is headed by Prof. David Schlangen. It was established in 2019 at the University of Potsdam, as a continuation of the “Dialogue Systems Group” that Prof. Schlangen headed at Bielefeld University from 2010 to 2019.

Mission Statement

We use computational methods to investigate communication — the process of making something that was in one head be in more than one head. More specifically, we are interested in multimodal dialogue, where language is the central interaction device, but the body of the participants can be a communication resource as well, and the physical environment can become a topic.

We study the complex interplay of intra- and inter-agent processes that makes real-time, situated dialogue possible. We are interested both in basic questions about the types of knowledge, the resources and the processes involved in multimodal dialogue (and how to represent them formally and computationally, and how to acquire them from data), as well as in applications of models thereof to human/computer interaction.

Keywords

Semantics; Dialogue; Multimodal Interaction; Meaning in Situated Interaction; Natural Language Understanding as an Interactive Process; Natural Human/Computer Interaction.

Publication Profile

We regularly publish at *ACLs, SIGdial, semdial, INLG, and other venues. Recent best paper awards at INLG (2018, 2016), SIGdial (2018).

colab?

Well, computational linguistics” lab, but it doesn’t hurt that co is also the prefix of communication, coordination, context, content, coherence, and, well, collaboration, which are all phenomena we’re interested in.