SPP 2556:  Robust Assessment & Safe Applicability of Language Modeling: Foundations for a New Field of Language Science & Technology (LaSTing)

• Subject Area: Social and Behavioural Sciences ; Humanities ; Computer Science, Systems and Electrical Engineering ; Medicine
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 560179209

No abstract available

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• International Connection: Italy, Netherlands, United Kingdom, USA

Projects

• A multidimensional adaptive test for the psychometric assessment of LLM capabilities (Applicant Günther, Fritz )
• A Resource Efficient Cross-linguistic Approach to Figurative Meaning Assessment in LLMs (Applicant Berger, Maria )
• Attention in Large Language Models: Linguistic Grounding, Cognitive Modeling, and Social Application (Applicants Gotzner, Nicole ;  Musslick, Sebastian )
• Coordination Funds (Applicant Franke, Michael )
• Evaluating, Explaining, and Enabling Ethical Multi-Agent Systems of Large Language Models (E4-MALM) (Applicants Lauscher, Anne ;  Lee, Jae Hee )
• Gesture-Informed Language Models: Evaluating Multimodal Discourse Processing in LLMs and Humans (Applicant Yung, Frances )
• Interpretable Surprisal: Language Models Between Linguistic Structure and Neural Evidence (Applicants Lopopolo, Alessandro ;  Rabovsky, Milena )
• KIND-LM: Cognitively-inspired interaction dynamics for sample-efficient language modeling (Applicants Beinborn, Lisa ;  Mani, Nivedita )
• Learning linguistic inferences and their alternatives (Applicants Romoli, Jacopo ;  Zinova, Yulia )
• Limits and Biases in Machine and Human Language and its Learning (Applicants Alexiadou, Artemis ;  Sauerland, Uli )
• LLADIGA: Learning Language with Dialogue Games (Applicant Schlangen, David )
• Moral Hallucinations in Large Language Models — Their Argumentative Structure and Ethical Implications (Applicants Hautli-Janisz, Annette ;  Reinhardt, Karoline )
• Propositional Attitudes in Large Language Models (PALLM) (Applicant Pasternak, Ph.D., Robert )
• Relating Probabilities of Words to Probabilities of Worlds (Applicant Papay, Sean )
• Structural generalization in transformer-based LLMs (Applicants Hahn, Michael ;  Koller, Alexander )
• Systemic Robustness Assessments of Language Models for Cross-Linguistic Research using Formally Related Structures (FORESTS) (Applicants Hartmann, Jutta M. ;  Himmelreich, Anke ;  Zarrieß, Sina )
• The evaluation of empathy-related linguistic performance in large language models: Comparing surprisal values for next-word predictions in human EEG and LLMs. (Applicant Werning, Markus )
• The pragmatic test: how humans and LLMs decode presupposed meaning (Applicants Bade, Nadine ;  Butt, Miriam )
• The Status of Linguistic Constraints in Neural Language Models (Applicant Hinrichs, Erhard W. )
• Understanding the Cross-Linguistic Brain Basis of Sentence Processing through Interpretable Language Technology (Applicant Meyer, Lars )
• Unreal engines — Understanding language models through resource-optimal analysis: Implicit Bayesian pragmatic reasoning & emergent causal world models (Applicant Franke, Michael )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Michael Franke